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Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

epoch.ai

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Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#381

Post by Incipient »

throawayonthe wrote: post #286
xbmcuser wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese manufacturers will probably takeover consumer ram that most of us use as current manufacturing contracts expire and Samsung SK and micron move all their production to HBM for data centers. Corsair recently released chinese chips based DDR5 sticks.

> Corsair recently released chinese chips based DDR5 sticks. hm interesting https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memo...

I've so far been anti-chinese memory in my recommendations, not because it's Chinese (I don't really trust any big organisation/govt other than the EU?) but because they've been very new, and it's not worth PC stability for saving $50.

However with corsair giving it their blessing, and their technology having matured a bit (a lot?), and more reviews showing good stability (longevity I suppose, is TBD) they're definitely worth recommending these days.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#382

Post by spaceman_2020 »

dominotw wrote: post #282
brandensilva wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is about to flood the market and prove this notion wrong. If there is demand they want to meet it with supply. But to your point, that is exactly how American companies like to play now. No one is stopping them from screwing over the consumer. I have a Micron near me and they are building another chip facility but we are years away still so I suspect China will beat them to the punch.

man i keep thinking. why cant india get into stuff like this. Do their own manhattan project to build factories and tech for this and immigrate experts with high salaries.

As an Indian, my quality of life would be improved more by the Indian state first figuring out how to make functional roads and garbage collection systems

India needs to first figure out the absolute basics

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#383

Post by bee_rider »

downrightmike wrote: post #325
XorNot wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China wants a sovereign DRAM capacity. They're playing an entirely different game then the commercial suppliers in the West.

And those commercial suppliers are making it too easy an putting themselves out of business before 2030

They’ll also go out of business if they make a massive investment to increase supply, and then the “AI” bubble pops, cratering demand. It’s a tough spot.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#384

Post by magicalhippo »

amluto wrote: post #292
curiousllama wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long would it take an aggressive company to expand production capacity? I always thought it takes a few years, at minimum, for even established players to stand up new fabs

As far as I can tell, Micron and SK Hynix are using EUV lithography and may be constrained by availability of the equipment, whereas CXMT does not have EUV machines. There were reports that EUV lithography is needed for high yields, but CXMT appears to be proving that wrong.

Micron was dragging its heel on EUV and only got it last year[1].

Seems it's mostly useful for LPDDR modules which are predominantly used in battery-powered devices and to improve margins.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/micron-sampl...

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#385

Post by nextaccountic »

jayd16 wrote: post #276
simonh wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the Apple way, but they might fund a supplier to build out capacity in return for priority access. The thing is they tend to only do that when they can get a technological competitive advantage. The priority access gives them a locked in competitive edge, for a while. It’s not clear there is an opportunity like that in memory.

It wasn't their way to design CPUs until it was their way.

Apple doesn't want to enter low margin business

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#386

Post by spaceman_2020 »

raincom wrote: post #367
dominotw wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

man i keep thinking. why cant india get into stuff like this. Do their own manhattan project to build factories and tech for this and immigrate experts with high salaries.

Thanks to Indian constitution and other laws, incompetence is heavily praised and promoted. Go to any public high/elementary schools, go to any private colleges, it is rampant. It has taken three generations to produce these bad results. Of course, I am not saying that students are dumb. It is just that many smart kids in villages if given an opportunity, will leave India in a heart beat because they don't see a brig…

Indian bureaucracy thinks extremely short term. The state prioritizes extracting revenue over all else. So many baffling short-term decisions over everything from corporate tax breaks to a incentives for global events like Formula 1.l

You really can’t expect the same bureaucratic setup to think in terms of the decade+ it would take to be competent at something like chips

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#387

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

radialstub wrote: post #161
gpm wrote: post #100

An interesting implication of this is that AI inference and training has a path to a ~3x hardware cost reduction (and maybe ~2x total cost reduction) without any technical innovation whatsoever, we just need to wait for dram supply to meet demand (either by manufacturing scaling or just waiting for the current rate of manufacturing to fill the demand spike).

The memory makers will not expand demand drastically. It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied, otherwise the following oversupply will kill them. Instead, supply is just rerouted from less profitable segments such as mobile and personal computing.

I struggle to think of a line of business as cyclical as DRAM, maybe like certain kinds of mining would be my only thought.

The DRAM fabs have been on a roundabout for 40 years going from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior, to struggling to keep the lights on.

And imo it's not really their fault, it's all the lead time of advanced semiconductors, combined with the commodity dynamics of oil. And the goal is to match that supply to the demand of everything from consumer electronics to more datacenters than you can shake a stick at.

It's maddening to try and solve that, so at this point I really don't fault them for prioritizing survival.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#388

Post by baq »

paulmist wrote: post #266
baq wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it crashes after it kills the PC we’ll be left with… nothing? Path matters as much as destination

Why would it kill PC? There will always be hobbyists, e.g. I can't imagine pro e-sports players running on a Mac. Personally, half of the reason I moved away from Windows is Microsoft stalling/degrading Windows experience.

Price of PCs causing a collapse in demand, then mass bankruptcies of companies making PC components so supply chains get demolished and when prices come back down there’s no one left selling anything so you can’t build a pc at any price

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#389

Post by cubefox »

wmf wrote: post #380
cubefox wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I still haven't heard any predictions on when new fabs will come online to meet the current demand. This shouldn't be too hard to find out, since the building time of fabs is very predictable process. The difficult question is more whether foreseeable memory demand will remain at the current level, grow even further, or shrink again.

No new DRAM fabs are being built. That's why you don't see any predictions.

Seems unlikely. Increased demand usually causes increased investment in increasing supply.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#390

Post by kristopolous »

byzantinegene wrote: post #336
kristopolous wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know there's other strategies? Companies can be more clever than naively undercutting each other... Memory in particular ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal The entry-cost to getting into memory is on the order of $billions and years - you can do just about anything...

not if china gets into the picture

why not? i'm sure they can jump into the hustle.

Increasing the availability doesn't mean decreasing the price ... people think those are intrinsically related - not so much.

You can get a prada shirt for $2,000 ... as many as you'd like, for $2,000 a piece. No problem. They'll make the factories go burr all night long. Still $2,000.sweeping

There's a bunch of things like this. $100 bills for instance ...

a new entrant might yield a price drop, or, it might not.

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