Link: https://wccftech.com/amd-puts-up-a-hefty-20-of-its-company-just-for-ai-deals/

Well kiss any sense of getting a new GPU or Processor good bye.

Fuck AI.

Imagine if the bubble pops and simply all these companies go bankrupt (because the shares are all tied by these mega deals), will there be ANY computing means available?

If shares drop enough, another company with cash on hand buys them.

Shares aren't revenue. The bubble pops, investors lose money, companies go back to selling PC components.

Saving me the legwork to not have to figure out which company is dead to me for treating its regular consumers like trash. I hope every one of these companies crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Never forget

On the upside, the evaporation of availability for high-end consumer hardware might lead to a renaissance in more reasonable hardware requirements for software. There's a lot of stuff we managed to do 20 or 30 years ago without anywhere near as much overhead. The indie gaming market already shows there's plenty of room for companies to work with more modest overhead.

Something something a follow up joke about special debt vehicles

That's a fair point. I feel that PC gaming was in a peak of consumerism with ridiculous prices and never ending "upgrades" so it'll be interesting to see if anything changes. I hope it does and some of that knowledge/skill and enthusiasm for optimisation comes back.

The problem is that the current production is for stuff that can't really be used as consumer equipment.

If enough of the world's component production capacity is dedicated to AI specific components, then when the bubble pops there won't be anything to sell to consumers for months which could cause the manufacturers to go under.

A certain amount of this seems to be happening anyway just because the culture at AAA studios is so inimical to gaming in general. Looking at a game like Peak, I don't see any indication that the devs went out of their way to reduce hardware requirements, but it's less intensive than major releases anyway. Companies not having the resources to spend years working on super detailed massive environments may end up working in their favor.

Honestly, I think something like Peak ends up feeling more intentional and well executed than something like Cyberpunk 2077. Peak's jank feels like it's just part of how the game is supposed to be, whereas Cyberpunk they put so much effort into some aspects that it's weird and jarring when you run into those things that break verisimilitude. But if Cyberpunk looked like it was designed by an indie dev with good enough but not state of the art graphics? I probably wouldn't notice some of the issues as much. Also I feel like there wouldn't be as much corporate involvement leading to the kind of hand-holding that shows up in Phantom Liberty.

This is headed toward devolving into me complaining about feeling like I'm not in half the scenes that revolve around Idris Elba rather than V, but you get the point!

AMD, you were the chosen one!

Gonna be a rough few years for PC gaming. Or any gaming, for that matter.

But hey, at least we'll keep killing jobs and the AI cat videos will continue to flow

They don't want us to own our own hardware. We already don't own (most) of our software or operating systems, even.

🙄

My games all still work fine, how is it rough?

This is lemmy, most of us use Linux or TempleOS.

Isn’t Microsoft stabbing itself in the foot? 11 is so bad it’s bogging down regular machines available before this nonsense

Is there a Lemmy client for TempleOS??

Yeah, but the odds of them just being allowed to fail like that are basically nil.

Come on, they never were. They're just another company with no ethics other "make all the money, consumers be damned" and always have been.

Come on, you know damn well that if the bubble pops, the global taxpayers will be bailing them and the rest of the affected companies out with direct payments just like the last global crash caused by corporations.

Executive bonuses and buy backs for corporations and austerity for the working man who just wants to play a video game is always the plan.

Gaming with Linux man. Just take the plunge now before AI consumes your rig completely.

You don't even have to do any serious things, even mobile phones can render any type of game today, no sweat (rare exceptions excluded).

Source: squeezed speed with dark magic for games twenty years ago. Non copying scroller lightspeed ftw!

Fun times.

They'll retool and start making what's profitable.

Better hope none of your parts die

Except by the time they do that there are already new Chinese competitors selling those components to their old customers.

Chinese RAM is already out and being tested. How long before they have viable products in the marketplace? Especially considering that they aren't really competing with anyone at the moment. Do you think people are going to suddenly switch back to spending 4x as much for American RAM once they are already happy with using this new shit?

How long before its processors and video cards?

You don't get customers back after you exit an industry unless you are offering a competitive price or something that no one else is offering.

I love your comment not only because it makes a lot of sense, but also because it taught me the words "inimical" and "verisimilitude." Thank you.

No, but you could probably port Firefox to Holy C.

11 runs great on 13 year old hardware, once you debloat it.

11 uses barely more resources than end of the run windows 10.

Hell half the reason I upgraded for certain games and programs.

Dislike. But I guess I can't blame them for letting someone else hold the bag.

Honestly, if the AI craze hadn't bought off all the basic components needed for consumer PC builds, I'd probably object, but as it is, the market for consumers is being so starved that they could not survive on sales to them alone.

That takes time and money, though.

"To big to fail" just like US automakers and banks.

The US government is bullshit.

Whales are always the most dangerous customer for a company to have. Because once a customer becomes a whale, they can dictate terms under threat of leaving. Or they can create massive secondary damage by their own failing.

Which is why I strongly suspect that many companies will become bankrupt once this AI bubble bursts - and not small ones, either. No, I fully expect nVidia to go into full Chapter 11 and lose 90+% of its value, requiring trillions in bailout in order to “save”.

Anyone who knows anything about boom-bust cycles will be escaping this bubble like rats from a ship.

I have games that will run on a pi, maybe even a pi zero and use the cheapest second hand tablet as a display. Or a fire stick/similar and use the TV if I can get Termux on it?

I will be glad it's just the US taxpayers that will pay for this mess this time if that is the case. You make this mess, you pay for it. Maybe you could have voted for someone that would regulate the markets a bit better.

🥇

Well I bet they have both of these.

Yes but have you considered not all of us want to play the absolute least demanding games all the time?

AMD, You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the cryptominers, not join them! Bring balance to the video card market, not leave it in darkness!

I don't find that. I had to upgrade our corporate machine to best on market work station to run 11 properly and its still chugs. It's also noticeable slower with apps, a downwars trend from 7 to 10 and now 11.

One thing that totally freezes it for too long is office auto installs ai.exe and aimgr.DLL in some deep folder place. If I delete them the system is somewhat better, but updates put them back

Not if they've bet the farm on income from AI hardware sales.

The agreements being made aren't for existing stock; they're for the total future production capacity. If the manufacturer produces a shit ton of AI hardware and the bubble pops, they're left with unusable inventory and nothing left to put on shelves. It's a fundamental flaw in JIT manufacturing.

This isn't excusing anything. The manufacturers are being extremely short sighted to the point of negligence and it's probably going to backfire on them. But if they go down it'll greatly impact consumer hardware production, likely for years.

"Too big to fail" translates to "we can't have this fail" so we will bail them out when it starts to.

I have tried TempleOS, its a wild interface that's for sure. One guy building a brand new OS is amazing. Imagine if he'd had good medicine or treatment that kept him sane, probably could have done a ton of amazing things

Define "best on the market work station". I've used 11 on a 10th gen ulv i5 laptop and it ran just fine, no worse than with 10 on it.

From the minor direct X improvements, all the way to actually supporting hybrid CPU architectures and 6ghz there's a lot of ways 11 performs better.

There’s really no way to escape the bubble pop. Not for us normal people anyway.

Most of the games I play are old enough to drink.

That's a definite possibility. But the op proposed that PC component vendors stock price would drop and therefore no one would build PC parts.

Chinese companies could fill the void if Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are slow to switch back. But there is no situation where companies simply stop taking money. However I believe that after the bubble pops, ram prices will not go back to the same price they were last year. Everyone will have to pay more and Chinese companies will be happy to take that extra money too.

I want you to think about these two statements that you made:

But there is no situation where companies simply stop taking money.

But the op proposed that PC component vendors stock would drop and therefore no one would build PC parts.

These cannot both be true. PC Component vendors will NOT stop selling parts and customers will NOT stop building PCs because that is leaving money on the table. They will source components from whoever will sell them at whatever price they can get. That is what WILL happen.

Don't do this to us! AMD was our last hope!

Open-source tech co-ops buy up the production capacity and flood the consumer market with cheap GPUs and RAM?

We can dream, at least...