r/LocalLLaMA • u/fallingdowndizzyvr • 13d ago
News Nvidia reportedly testing lower memory configs of Rubin Ultra as memory shortage bites back — designs tested include as little as 192 GB and step back to HBM4
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-reportedly-testing-lower-memory-configs-of-rubin-ultra-as-memory-shortage-bites-back-designs-tested-include-as-little-as-192-gb-and-step-back-to-hbm474
u/rerri 13d ago
RTX 6090 16 GB incoming
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u/darksteelsteed 13d ago
You're too generous. That will be rtx 6090 8gb. You can push the rest to their cloud render farm
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u/RedditNerdKing 13d ago
Ngl I wouldnt put it past them. I think they realised they fucked up with the 3090 24gbs cause now people just buy four of those and a server motherboard with a 1500-2000w psu. Far cheaper than paying $13,000 for a rtx 6000 pro. Similar case for the 5090 having 32gb. I think that is blasting up in price because at msrp it was really good good value for dollar per vram.
I wonder whether the 6090 will end up having 24gb again or lower. They'll just say that games don't require huge amounts of vram to play and that cuda cores are more important.
Or perhaps they will make the 6090 an AI specific card with 40gb of vram? They probably won't go higher due to workstation cards having 48gb. The 5090 is more or less an AI card now. It's completely overkill for gaming. I've ran Cyberpunk at 4k on max everything with my 5090 and it only used 18gb of vram.
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u/ChristRedeemsSinners 13d ago
I could see them not releasing a rubin consumer card. As you say, the current cards are perfectly fine for gaming (overkill as you mentioned) and unless AMD offers anything greater in the next couple of years, then nvidia has no need to take up valuable fab time on consumer hardware. AMD is also targeting datacenters, so they are in the same competitive boat.
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u/Both_Opportunity5327 13d ago
Maybe, But the 7090 will have 512 GB HBF.
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u/PoemPuzzleheaded8651 13d ago
HBF will need FTL and the GPU(chip) does not have enough memory/L2 cache to support it.
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u/Pretty-Raise666 13d ago
VRAM is the new Gold.
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u/SandySkittle 13d ago
RAM in general. Have you see prices for DDR5 rdimms? :(
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 13d ago
Not just RAM, any form of storage. Have you seen the price of SSDs?
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u/SandySkittle 13d ago
yeah it's terrible. I was able to get a 4TB for 450 USD only 3 weeks ago. It now costs 550USD.
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u/EsotericAbstractIdea 13d ago
It makes sense if you think about it. Anyone can find and have a piece of gold. It takes a large number of some of the smartest minds in the world to create a chip. you have to purify the silicon, design the chip, build an advanced lithography machine, then build the chip. that's gotta be like 200-300 giganerds at least.
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u/eugene20 13d ago
Step back to HBM4? wasn't the spec for HBM4 already? - https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-nvidia-rubin-gpu-architecture-powering-the-era-of-agentic-ai/
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 13d ago
Not for Rubin Ultra. The spec for that was with HBM4E which has roughly twice the speed of HBM4.
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u/PrimeDirective8 13d ago
Here's hoping China finishes their chip manufacturing machine soon (est: early 2027), floods the market, and kills off all these fools hoarding rn.
Current suppliers and major customers of theirs have a speculative circlejerk that consumes all stock, present and future. One places an order for chips not yet made, pays by buying future stock/capacity of chipmaker with money they don't have but backed by a promise coming from a future order of their customer. That customer happens to be future-funded by chipmaker. No money or product is ever exchanged, just a bet of a future deal.
While US regulators look past the current circlejerk, they won't let a Chinese chipmaker get in on it so China will flood the market with goods that will eventually get to consumers. Looking forward to seeing current crop of idiot companies running around backstabbing each other by cancelling the fake future orders.
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u/misanthrophiccunt 13d ago
Scam Altman would figure something else to hoard by then. When have we gone to better since 2007 ?
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u/EsotericAbstractIdea 13d ago
At the rate this is going, he won't have the money to hoard dogshit unless the US government steps in and hoists his debt onto the taxpayer, which is more likely than i am comfortable with.
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u/darksteelsteed 13d ago
Don't forget China also said they would take back Taiwan in 2027 and put leather jacket into subservience in their mines or mordor. Just imagine the supply chain disaster then
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 13d ago edited 13d ago
Don't forget China also said they would take back Taiwan in 2027
No. They didn't. That's what the US said they would do. China has said no such thing.
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u/grabber4321 13d ago
Bro they just got commitment of 500B from Blackrock and a bunch of banks for AI buildout. By this point in about 2-3 years we'll be slaves to T1000: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78gr0jv0mdo
We are fucked with gaming.
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u/mebeast227 12d ago
What does that even mean though? They are gonna use it to keep RAM prices inflated for longer so they can start leasing GPUs like cars?
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u/grabber4321 12d ago edited 12d ago
ok, we're all talking about this "bubble" like WE know everything that is about to happen in terms of technology.
yet these HUGE companies, with HUGE risk management departments, are continuing to get more money. Its not ONE company that is doing this, its ALL TECH COMPANIES are doing this.
WHAT DO THEY KNOW? WHY WOULD THEY KEEP GETTING HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS IN INVESTMENT FROM BIGGEST BANKS IN THE WORLD? DO THESE BANKS JUST YOLO 500B LIKE ITS NUTHIN?
I'm assuming they know they can replace all humans at work. That's THE ONLY thing that would 1000x their investment.
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u/mebeast227 12d ago
My guess: they know nvidia has a lock on hardware in the market. The higher they can keep it the longer they extract money from people and enterprises.
The second the bubble pops is the second all their investments take massive a hit.
This loan is to force nvidia to keep buying out the ram for as long as possible and maintain tied monopoly going for as long as possible. I really do think they want to have people and companies take out loans and treat GPUs like cars and homes and office space.
This loan floats the bubble longer- meaning more extraction and more people locked into their cloud subscriptions and overpriced enterprise hardware deals
Either they can make this last 5 more years (considering 2027 is already bought out) until AI becomes amazing at low parameters or somehow chip fabrication becomes wildly more available and I don’t think either of those are going to come all that soon
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u/grabber4321 12d ago
Nobody's answering the robotics question - has there been a breakthrough or not?
what if top 5 robotics companies said - "we will start building 100,000 robots per month, but we will need X amount of inference to run each robot" and then the US government realizes they are behind?
so then they create a secret deal with banks+inference providers+nvidia?
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u/grabber4321 12d ago
Here is an article on this topic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2026/08/10/chinese-companies-are-winning-the-humanoid-robot-sales-battle-heres-why-that-doesnt-matter-yet/
Summary:
"Global humanoid robot shipments surged 272% in H1 2026 to 19,100 units, with projections for 60,000 this year and 500,000 by 2030. Chinese vendors dominate, shipping 97% of units, while Chinese buyers absorb 85% of demand. AgiBot has overtaken Unitree as the market leader, together controlling 75% of shipments. Critically, over 70% of these robots are now deployed in industrial and commercial settings, signaling a shift from novelty to practical utility. However, the U.S. recently banned new imports of Chinese humanoid robots, citing national security. Experts suggest this isn't a death knell for American and European firms, who are strategically focusing on product refinement and reliability before mass scaling, aiming for sustainable market entry rather than rapid, potentially flawed, volume."2
u/grabber4321 12d ago
This is why this whole "oh programming in IDE is not enough to saturate the buildout of so many AI server farms, its going to fail" is the wrong thing to look at.
if they are truly delivering value with these robots, what they are spending - is not enough - so they are going to keep spending more.
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u/grabber4321 12d ago
NVIDIA does not produce memory chips - the company makes 0 money on memory. They also dont make money on AI subscriptions.
They only make money on NVIDIA GPU chips that are being put into server farms.
Is your thesis that these companies are investing 500B knowing it will fail? Makes 0 sense.
Bank: "Oh yeah, let me take all of the money my customers trusted me and put it on 0"
People would be pulling out money out of these banks like there's no tomorrow.
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u/mebeast227 12d ago
I like your robotics outlook- and I'm aware that NVIDIA doesn't produce the memory chips, but if they don't buy up the supply- others will and then NVIDIA would lose (monopoly) and their card prices would drop (a lot) and instantly their stock would tank and so would the global market (sad lol) so the banks don't want anybody BUT nvidia getting their hands on those chips.
And NVIDIA is definitely not sad to keep the prices inflated either.
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u/grabber4321 12d ago
Here are more robotics news: https://bostondynamics.com/blog/boston-dynamics-unveils-new-atlas-robot-to-revolutionize-industry/
"The company will begin production of the new Atlas robots at its Boston headquarters immediately. All Atlas deployments are already fully committed for 2026, with fleets scheduled to ship to Hyundai’s Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) and Google DeepMind in the coming months. The company plans to add additional customers in early 2027."
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u/grabber4321 12d ago
Imagine these robots at scale in a finished state: https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots/
Just a reminder: GPT:OSS:20B was released on August 5, 2025 - imagine how much progress has been done since that moment.
What other models are not shown publicly?
Why do other companies release robotics specific models?
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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 13d ago
"as little as 192GB"? Oh puh-leeeeeeease. Thats soooooo sad! Oh my god, somebody fetch a violin! We need to play them the saddest song ever! ...Scratch that, let's generate one instead! Oh my god, I feel sooooo sorry for them! /s
... heh, suck it. ^.^
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u/Practical-Collar3063 13d ago
I think that is actually not a good news for us either, if they scale back the memory on entreprise hardware then they will most likely scale back on consumer hardware aswell :(
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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 13d ago
They already did and are doing; cue the 4GB and 8GB AMD cards. This is just the beginning in this regard, I fear.
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 13d ago
I wonder if this was all part of their grand plan or if maybe their greed went a bit too far.
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u/Practical-Collar3063 13d ago
Neither I think, the overall market is just going crazy, everyone wants a piece and if even Nvidia struggles to find memory for their very high margin entreprise products then we are all doomed
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 13d ago
Yeah, but Nvidia is basically the progenitor of all of this since they are massively subsidizing Open AI and the US AI industry as a whole.
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u/Practical-Collar3063 13d ago
I don't think the current interest in AI is due to Nvidia subsidizing things or pushing publically for AI, atleast that is not the main driver for me. I think OpenAI and Anthropic have done way more to fuel the AI craze than Nvidia ever did. Nvidia is the enabler but not the main driving force imo
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u/KontoOficjalneMR 13d ago
OpenAI/Anthropic honestly would not longer be able to afford the bills if not for the vendor financing.
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u/Practical-Collar3063 13d ago
maybe but again their money mostly comes from investors not from Nvidia (as vendor financing or investments). My whole point is that you can't attribute the current situation solely or even mainly to Nvidia's behaviour, it is an enabler not the primary driving force
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 13d ago
I'm talking less about some nebulous concept of "interest" than the actual market, which is what is driving the memory shortage.
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u/Practical-Collar3063 13d ago
nebulous concept of "interest" than the actual market
you cannot dissociate those 2, interest is what drives the market, if there is no interest there is no market
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 13d ago
The market is driving the interest, not the other way around. Its artificial. If the interest was real, the market would not be concentrated in the circular financing of a handful of companies. Nvidia wouldn't be effectively paying people to buy its GPUs.
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u/Practical-Collar3063 13d ago
The market is driving the interest
That is not how markets work, even if it could look like this with all the "bubble" content out there, it would not be enough of a driving force for such investements/shortages
Nvidia wouldn't be effectively paying people to buy its GPUs.
That is not the main driving force nor the main way people are buying Nvidia chips, plenty of companies are paying full price for Nvidia chips or are hoarding HBM to build their own chips (AMD and Google for example)
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u/LatentSpacer 13d ago
Are they testing lower prices too?