Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

news.skhynix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 188 posts

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#141

Post by gruez »

magicsmoke wrote: post #130
lumost wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has an arguably overbuilt military supply chain. But in practice modern military hardware is both expensive and slow. The destructive capacity of modern great powers effectively limits the timeline of any large war to either hours(nuclear bombardment) or weeks ( precision bombing of all military and industrial targets ) The real loss is that industrial enterprises employ a lot of people who are exposed to hard…

This. The US's biggest future threat isn't having its military production choked off in a conflict. It's having its military complex become irrelevant as the world moves towards a model where money and consumer technology become the main avenues for influence and control, and where the moment the US tries to flex its military muscle it gets put on a decades-long blacklist by members of the global economy for starting…

>it gets put on a decades-long blacklist by members of the global economy for starting a mess.

because that worked so well for the weimar republic?

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#142

Post by ardy42 »

magicsmoke wrote: post #122
ardy42 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America is the world power least worried about physical geography and locations if and when the shooting starts. 2 oceans as moats, plenty of oil and natural resources on its home turf, and all potential flashpoints on the other side of the world. Can you grow semiconductors on corn plants? Big moats don't help with embargoes, and if your economy is based on international trade (like the globalization crowd has cha…

Apparently when war starts iPhones will be more important than oil, steel, jets, and ships. Or does China build those for the US military as well? Also, ICBMs fly both ways. But while nobody decides to press the "End Game" button, the US with its self sufficient continent can weather more punches than any other country in any conceivable conventional war scenario.

> Apparently when war starts iPhones will be more important than oil, steel, jets, and ships. Or does China build those for the US military as well?

Sure, the US military has maintained low-volume domestic manufacturing capability in those areas to meet peacetime military demand.

However, you mentioned WWII. Did the US fight that with just its preexisting military-allocated production capacity? It did not. You had jukebox companies drafted into making rifles and car companies into building tanks and airplanes. Electronics are key to most modern military equipment, and guess who has the spare manufacturing capacity in that area now?

> Also, ICBMs fly both ways. But while nobody decides to press the "End Game" button, the US with its self sufficient continent can weather more punches than any other country in any conceivable conventional war scenario.

Attacks with long-range conventional missiles are also a distinct possibility.

You also used that word "self-sufficient" again. The issue here is contemporary Western politico-economic dogma has abandoned the idea of self-sufficiency in favor of interdependence and free trade. China, has not done that, and appears to have deliberate industrial policy with the goal of modernized self-sufficiency. IIRC, its main imports are raw materials, which it may still be able to obtain through trade (e.g. Russian oil and gas) or military capture in a hot war.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#143

Post by wtallis »

baybal2 wrote: post #109
ksec wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Intel's NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane It is important to note Optane is manufactured in partnership with Micron. The partnership is that Intel still owns part of the IP, but actual manufacturing with guarantee capacity is still done by Micron. And judging from previous Micron Investor notes, Intel hasn't been keeping up with their Optane Sales and buying agreement. So that means Intel will no longer be…

There is a lot of flash makers, way, way more than DRAM makers. And there is tons of flash going to things other than PCs, unlike DRAM. Regular DDR DRAM only goes to high-end desktop PCs, and servers, with few laptops. Everything else has switched to the LP-DDR line even if there is no explicit need for energy saving (LPDDR4 may actually cost you less than regular DDR4 these days, especially given the extra for DIMM/…

Intel's been focusing their flash development and production specifically for their enterprise SSDs. While you can find Intel flash in some third-party drives, it's not particularly common. And even when Intel and Micron were still partnered for NAND, it was Micron that wanted to make smaller-capacity dies for use in things like smartphones and memory cards. Intel's been all about big dies for big drives. This is really evident if you look at their market share in terms of SSD units shipped and in terms of SSD bytes shipped. Intel's average drive capacity in Q2 was almost three times that of Hynix.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#144

Post by jjoonathan »

coliveira wrote: post #136
jjoonathan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. China figured out that they can just pay the hand to shoot the foot. The hand commissions some academic opinions on the virtues of foot-shooting so that in the unlikely case someone tries to hold it accountable it can claim it didn't know that foot-shooting was bad.

Sorry, but China didn't do this, it was the US that did it to itself. China just saw the opportunity and acted on it.

It takes two to tango.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#145

Post by wtallis »

blackcat201 wrote: post #12

Does Intel only sold the NAND manufacturing parts to SK Hynix or it also includes the SSD controllers IP? Because most of Intel SSD performance came from the controller not the NAND flash themselves, in fact Intel usually lag behind in NAND flash manufacturing.

It will probably include the controller IP. However, none of Intel's IP will be transferred until 2025. That should give them time to disentangle any of the IP that's shared between the NAND SSD controllers and the Optane SSD controllers, and give Hynix time to decide whether it's worth continuing development of both their existing enterprise SSD controllers and Intel's designs.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#146

Post by wtallis »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #76

A tinge of sadness. I remember reading reviews of the X-25 like a decade ago and being so excited (it was this anandtech review https://www.anandtech.com/show/2614 ). To me it was the dawn of the "common SSD". Just now I've looked at a bunch of timelines of SSD history, and I suspect the X-25 was similar to many other people. There was certainly a lot of SSD activity prior to the X-25 being released, but it seemed li…

Intel pretty much stopped being relevant to the consumer SSD market as soon as the SSD market as a whole broadened enough to support the development of client/consumer-specific SSD controllers. Once Intel could no longer compete by stripping a few features out of an enterprise SSD design, their consumer SSD products had no real advantage over other brands. (Minor exception: Intel's consumer QLC NVMe drives have consistently had very good retail prices.)

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#147

Post by wtallis »

benbenolson wrote: post #119

Really deceptive title. They didn't exit the memory business; it was just their NAND business specifically. The title on skhynix.com is more correct.

Intel's divesting their NAND memory business, they haven't had a DRAM business in a very long time, and they have not yet started up their own production of 3D XPoint memory, or even announced concrete plans to do so. The title is accurate even though it does not include all the relevant context.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#148

Post by coliveira »

jjoonathan wrote: post #144
coliveira wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but China didn't do this, it was the US that did it to itself. China just saw the opportunity and acted on it.

It takes two to tango.

There is a big difference. The US was led astray due to its economic ideology. There was a concerted effort to move industry to other countries, so that salaries in the US would be depressed for lower income classes and the owners of industry could realize larger profits for a generation. Now the country is finally realizing that this is a losing proposition, while China saw the opportunity and based its economy on industrialization and scientific research.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#149

Post by Reason077 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #115
m463 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and Tesla

Tesla has sold fewer than a million cars since 2012. That’s a rounding error, and unless they scale up, they will remain a rounding error. Of course that has nothing to do with their overvalued market cap.

> "Tesla has sold fewer than a million cars since 2012."

At the end of 2019, Tesla's cumulative global sales were 891,000 units. They are targeting 500,000 for 2020 alone, so will be well over a million by now.

Tesla are very much in the process of scaling up, with massive factories under construction in Germany and Texas, and major expansion underway at the Shanghai factory. These factories will each be able to produce more than 500,000 vehicles per year.

Post reply on HN