this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Well that's not great... They're already pretty expensive as it is.

[–] _number8_ 54 points 10 months ago (7 children)

yeah i thought 4TB would be like $50 now. whatever happened to moore's law

[–] [email protected] 50 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Unregulated capitalism some would say, I say cheap production costs with little to no consequence whatsoever for them doing this kind of thing.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Exactly, if forced scarcity was regulated, we’d be in an entirely different situation. For instance diamonds would be practically worthless.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Unless this is a matter of price collusion (which I doubt as it appears more as a supply demand issue) I don't think this unregulated capitalism is bad. Last I checked making any kind of products involving semiconductors isn't cheap or easy. Maybe it is once you figure out how to, but the R&D costs involved are insane.

We as consumers want prices as low as possible. Suppliers want prices as high as possible. Samsung (and the like) clearly aren't willing to make more of a product at the price that it is currently at (which is a mistake to begin with). There are plentu of other players making ssds, and the prices are all very similar. Something tells me that they're not gonna price things for cheaper because they can't survive that way.

[–] TheGrandNagus 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Moore's law has been dead for a long long time.

E: if you're downvoting this it's because you don't have a clue what you're talking about. Moore's law was the observation that transistor density would double every ~2 years. That's not happening and hasn't for a long time.

[–] neclimdul 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No need to downvote this. It's an insidery technically correct statement. We've redefined how we measure Moore's law several times to make it "keep working" and some people designing chips, not selling them, think it's not only outlined it's usefulness but also not true anymore.

[–] TheGrandNagus 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In my experience, a lot of people incorrectly conflate Moore's Law with "computers get faster"

So when you say Moore's Law is dead and it's unrealistic to expect it not to be, they get upset and jump to the conclusion that you're defending tech companies for giving paltry upgrades, which obviously isn't what I'm doing.

There are other things to PCs getting faster in a post Moore's Law world. Architecture improvements, hardware acceleration, advanced packaging such as AMD's chiplet technology, etc - these are all commonplace and have replaced the idea of "let's just double transistor counts every two years"

[–] neclimdul 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

We've gone through die size, clock speed, instructions and operations, the transistors count. All are stand-ins for "complexity" which is why some people question if the law ever existed.

That said, regardless of the "real" law, until recently the colloquial usage has always been a stand in for how "quick" a processor is. In that sense, you really need to do some hand waving around core counts and even then it doesn't really work.

Maybe more importantly, one of the most important processor markets are mobile and servers which are largely focused on less complex more efficient processors like arm.

So outside of marketing, it's very easy to see why a lot of people think Moore's law is dead and we're all better for it. We can continually make better processors without trying to meet some arbitrary metric that didn't really mean anything useful to start with.

E: aggressively agreeing

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Moore's law hasn't died, if you mean number of transistors per area. Linear scaling to transistor counts has.

[–] TheGrandNagus 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It absolutely has. Transistor count in an area absolutely is not doubling every two years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I just checked. Yup, you're right. Funny though that Pat of all people claims it's not dead lol

[–] bassomitron 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I thought Moore's law was only for CPUs/chip density?

[–] mihnt 5 points 10 months ago

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend.

It is.

[–] Aceticon 1 points 10 months ago

It's about the shrinking in integrated circuit feature size, hence increase in IC element densities, so it applies to memories which are integrated circuits such as flash memory and the various kinds of RAM, but not to magnetic storage such as in HDDs as they're something else altogether.

That said, I believe (but am not absolutelly sure) that IC feature size has been shrinking slower than Moore's Law predicts for maybe a decade as the size of the features becomes so small that quantum-level effects start becoming a problem (think stuff like signal leaks due to quantum tunnelling).

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 4 points 10 months ago

As tech shrinks it’s only getting more and more expensive per mm. Unless we get some major improvement we’re kinda at the limit for the moment.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Moore's law makes no comments about the cost of each transistor in an advanced process. And believe me, they ain't cheap. It's not a coincidence we're up to PLC flash... why go for 32 levels when TLC is likely already a pain?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Yeah, spend $200 on a 4tb m.2 gen4, or $200 on a 18tb hdd

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

SSDs are absurdly cheap at the moment. 2023s demand glut led to a huge over abundance of SSDs and dirt cheap prices.

[–] NoRodent 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Right? SATA III SSDs currently cost the same as HDDs of the same capacity, at least where I live. If it stays like that, it will no longer make any sense to buy HDDs. Finally.

I still remember buying my first SSD some 10 years ago which at the time cost 20 times more per GB of what it costs now.