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

CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

koreaherald.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 274 posts

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#151

Post by sho »

nutjob2 wrote: post #9
someperson wrote: post #4

As a outside observer, NAND and DRAM prices have skyrocket ed with the AI infrastructure boom just as the China-based fabs are coming online. It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM. But right now it seems they can max out their supply capacity without selling below cost. Appears to me like China…

It's funny that you call this an "very aggressive dumping strategy" while AI vendors are doing the same but with even greater losses and on a much larger scale. It's all simply a fight for market share. The original sin is the existing DRAM vendors selling their entire (spare) capacity to the likes of OpenAI.

Can we please stop with this irritatingly persistent myth? AI companies, at least the big ones, do not sell inference at a loss - far from it. This has been debunked and explained many times and yet it keeps being repeated.

The numbers aren't public but most guesses I've heard are that Anthropic's markup is around 50% on average, and that if considered in isolation, most models are profitable overall. The constant losses are instead due to training the next models, which will also eventually recoup but later, and forward capex investment.

This idea that big AI companies are normally and systematically selling inference at a loss as some kind of market share strategy is just not supported by the facts.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#152

Post by 15155 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #126
Neywiny wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Let's do the math. The fastest sd cards can read at around 300 MB/s ( https://havecamerawilltravel.com/fastest-sd-cards/ ). Modern GPUs use 16 lanes of PCIe gen 5, which is 16x32Gb/s = 512Gb/s = 64 GB/s. Meaning you'd need over 200 of the fastest SD cards. So what you're asking is: is there a reason GPUs don't use 200 SD cards? And I can't think of any way that would work

Some years ago I realized that if I had oodles of money to spend I would totally get someone to make a PCIe card with like several hundreds microSD cards on it. You can buy vertical microSD connectors, so you can stack quite a lot of them on a PCIe card. Then a beefy FPGA to present it as a NVMe device to the host. Goal total capacity, as you can put 1TB cards in there. And for teh lulz of course.

This isn't a very difficult thing to build, but I am curious - what's the point? Who is the market?

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#153

Post by bhouston »

throwaway290 wrote: post #134
yanhangyhy wrote: post #129

Whenever China is mentioned, it's always about government subsidies, as if Samsung didn't receive government subsidies when it was developing

remind me is Samsung's source subsidies also regularly attacking every country's telecoms and infrastructure

I've heard that Samsung's business practices can be quite predatory. Basically if you have cool tech and you try to sell it to Samsung, you'll often get a few meetings and then they will go silent and then what you were trying to sell them will be offered by them as a new product about a year later. At least this was the situation like a decade ago.

I think this is because they are a huge conglomerate and there are divisions and groups that specialize in everything and their (Samsung) culture is to do everything as much as possible in house.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#154

Post by erxam »

throwaway290 wrote: post #134
yanhangyhy wrote: post #129

Whenever China is mentioned, it's always about government subsidies, as if Samsung didn't receive government subsidies when it was developing

remind me is Samsung's source subsidies also regularly attacking every country's telecoms and infrastructure

You mean the US? Yeah, they are.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#155

Post by blackoil »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #133
Forgeties79 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, I spent $105 USD (all in) for 2x16gb DDR5 ram last April

2x48GB DDR5 for $285 last March. Turns out I got the wrong kit for that build and had to buy another. It was too late to return it.

If you still have that wrong kit, now it's the time to sell it to make a fortune.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#156

Post by timschmidt »

pdhborges wrote: post #95
timschmidt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different types of DRAM can literally be made from the same already-etched wafer. The DRAM bits themselves don't change at all. What's different between DDR4, DDR5, and HBM is the IO interface to the chip. Changing this does not require significant retooling or relearning.

Does that mean CXMT is one inch away from also eating into the DDR5 market?

They're still at somewhat of a process disadvantage, but they have demonstrated an ability to produce DDR4 on older processes than it's typically been produced on. So it stands to reason that their process disadvantage will not stop them from producing DDR5 at scale. Their DDR5 will just use a little more silicon, and squeeze the jigglyness from a few more electrons, but in this market, who cares if RAM cost 15% more to make and was 15% less efficient to run, if it's available to purchase at all.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#157

Post by XorNot »

api wrote: post #135
abtinf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically, VC funded firms are inventing new markets entirely. Simply overcoming startup capital costs is not the argument being made when folks claim dumping.

They are? Most of what VC funded companies do has been done before at a smaller scale, often with less polish and at a higher price. VC money is used to scale up, cut costs with scale, capture markets, and then usually prices go up later depending on the economics. The Chinese state is basically just acting as a big VC fund for Chinese manufacturing industries. A VC fund with a sovereign currency and the ability to s…

It's questionable whether the ghost cities truly exist though. I was under the impression they were a product of China's bizarre savings and investment market, and that a lot of them have since filled up?

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#158

Post by victorbjorklund »

RobotToaster wrote: post #98
someperson wrote: post #4

As a outside observer, NAND and DRAM prices have skyrocket ed with the AI infrastructure boom just as the China-based fabs are coming online. It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM. But right now it seems they can max out their supply capacity without selling below cost. Appears to me like China…

It's amazing what can be achieved when you can plan 5 years in advance, instead of just making the line go up for the next quarter.

Don’t forget all the times those plans fail because the world did not turn out to be what you thought it would.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#159

Post by ahartmetz »

0_____0 wrote: post #149
abtinf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is littered with the corpses of those slaughtered by the millions in the name of great leader’s 5 year plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority. Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals? If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look…

I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible.

There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#160

Post by ahartmetz »

zozbot234 wrote: post #113
Espressosaurus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the domestic industry stagnates (at best) or disappears (at worst). You can't just spin up a 2nm wafer fab when the latest you've been running is a 300nm process. Compare: US shipbuilding industry to China or SK.

We don't want to spin up wafer fabs because, historically, they had a tendency to turn into Superfund sites. That's why the more modern approach is to build the fab in the middle of a frickin' desert.

Historically, but likely not anymore. You wouldn't be allowed to casually poison the ground in a Western factory anymore and we have the technology to keep the environment mostly clean. I don't even see it being very expensive compared to other fab costs. Have a sealed floor and proper waste / exhaust processing, don't spill in the first place. Things must be extremely well controlled anyway.
Post reply on HN