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Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

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Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#121

Post by nubinetwork »

Neywiny wrote: post #7

HBM is also DRAM. I also think it's kind of a weak argument to say that them discontinuing ddr3 (which while in use still today in industrial/embedded was on the way out for consumers 10 years ago) and ddr4 which last had consumer CPUs for it 3 years ago is meaningful. What we need now is ddr5. Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing. It's…

I was hoping it was a typo, and they actually meant 4 and 5... I didn't even know people made products that still use ddr3.

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#122

Post by dcrazy »

xiphias2 wrote: post #93
dcrazy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An agreement to restrict production, sales, or output is just as illegal as direct price fixing, because reducing the supply of a product or service drives up its price. For example, the FTC challenged an agreement among competing oil importers to restrict the supply of lubricants by refusing to import or sell those products in Puerto Rico. The competitors were seeking to pressure the legislature to repeal an envir…

But Micron didn't restrict the output: it stopped producing DDR2-3-4 completely, so it's not profiting from DDR customers at all.

So they restricted it to zero?

Not saying I agree with the plaintiffs.

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#123

Post by Danox »

dominotw wrote: post #77
mrtksn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is using something from someone, you can even argue that US owes India and Europe huge compensation because pretty much everything US did in the last half century was made using technology or people funded by those people. Johny Ive is British, Almost all the AI stuff is created by Europeans, Israelis, and Canadians - thus funded by their respective taxpayers. The thing about the US losing its grip on the wo…

> Steve Jobs is Syrian lol he is not. at no point was he a syrian. his mom was from ohio or something.

Steve Jobs’s dad, his biological dad, is Syrian, and he may still be alive because he outlived his son lived in northern Nevada, Steve’s circumstances somewhat similar to Barack Obama, where two college students in the fifties early sixties, who were unmarried had an unexpected pregnancy.

Note Steve’s biological mom and biological dad, the Syrian, kept their second child, a girl, and Steve even met her later on in life.

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#124

Post by cassianoleal »

microgpt wrote: post #110
cassianoleal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll do it. Will you give me the seed money?

No, basic capitalism logic is that you already have enough money because barriers to competition are low.

lol :D

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#125

Post by topgrain2 »

jmyeet wrote: post #107

Antitrust and anticompetitive behavior continue to evolve. Back when the Sherman Act was passed, we were talking about backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms. One of the more important ways of recent years is where all or most competitors in a market use the same software that outputs the same value as to what they should charge. This is effective collusion even if it isn't explicit. The goal of such software is to rai…

It used to be possible to bust up a company based (more or less) simply on their having too much of the market.

Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades.

Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#126

Post by stymaar »

tyre wrote: post #102
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total fines of about half a billion. Thats not nothing but it also does not seem like a real disincentive. Samsung is about to hand out ~$26B in bonuses. SK Hynix something similar-ish.

Yes, but for context Samsung is a massive chaebol. You need to compare it to the business unit in question. It’s different to, say, Google’s vertical monopoly in advertising where that’s most of their revenue.

This! Samsung is one of the world's biggest ship maker for instance.

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#127

Post by chris_money202 »

w10-1 wrote: post #103

dumb peripheral question: memory as a circuit would seems easy to add directly on-chip for a company like Apple. Is that blocked by time-frame, IP, technology, cost?

My guess is area becomes problematic. Chip becomes bigger, harder to manufacture without defects, costs rise as a result of those defects.

Bonus though, Apple is using "defective" chips in other products now such as the Neo which will help some with costs, but overall, you can't just add memory to the chip because the chip can become very yield sensitive, the process has to be there to produce the yield effectively.

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#128

Post by Danox »

russli1993 wrote: post #51
mrtksn wrote: post #38

What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction? They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

memory is a commodity is laughable. Then software engineering is even more a commodity, the amount of engineering going into making memory chips the vast majority of people don't understand. There are a lot of software engineers getting this field after leetcoding and copy from hellointerview. Claude can write you an app in 30 minutes. Try build a lpddr5 dram chip in 30 minutes. Manufacturing know how itself is a spe…

It’s a barrier, but not an insurmountable barrier. Most of the companies are somewhat lazy and somewhat cheap, but if circumstances change in the market, that make it untenable, they will take on making their own memory or making arrangements with someone else.

It’s been done with processors, modems, SSDs and many other specialized chips. The design and engineering part can already be done at several companies, they just elect not to do anything on the fab side. But they will, if they have to in the long run.

It takes two to four years and Five to twenty billion dollars. Some of the bigger companies, if pushed, particularly, if the alternative is getting chips from China, will do something on the fab side if they absolutely have to. They probably won’t live with the current conditions forever.

There was a company that had three companies say no over about 10 years, eventually, they made a decision to build their own processor known as the M-series…

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#129

Post by cosmic_cheese »

Chyzwar wrote: post #104
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The AI bubble is an insane distortion and the gravy train isn’t going to last forever. Betting the farm on everlasting datacenter demand is myopic. 2. In a healthy, competitive market there would be smaller manufacturers that’d be happy to take up the big guys’ discarded business.

1. But it might last for at least few more years, see Nvidia 1 trillion backlog. 2. Semiconductor manufacturing is the most complex industrial process in the world. You need billions of capex and decades of experience. Even existing semi players like intel cannot switch production to memory. China CXMT is gaing traction in DDR market. New fabs from all players wil come online in the next two years.

[dead]

Re: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

#130

Post by Danox »

glimshe wrote: post #6

Everybody in our industry loves fat margins. But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.

A fat margin is fine. What’s not fine is saying you don’t have any and you don’t plan to make any more.
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