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

koreaherald.com

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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The domestic industry is still there, only instead of mass-market DRAM it has started making higher-valued varieties of the same stuff. If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff, just at much higher cost. You can't expect more than that, since they never really were as big or as low-cost as the lowest cost suppliers can be in normal times. That's not "losing" capacity, it's jus…

If the domestic industry had the capability of competing with China on mass-market goods at a profit but just chooses not to in order to pursue a higher-profitability niche, why not simply grow and do both at the same time, instead of yielding the mass market to China? In my mind, if it can't do that, then it can't make the volume that China does at the cost that China does, which means it really isn't as capable as…

Because by pursuing a more profitable niche, you can grow quicker and make more profit. If you really want to do both, you enter the mass market from above, with only slightly higher quality products than what the market leader offers. And you do that after your position in the more profitable niches has long been secured. It's silly to do it any other way.

> which means it really isn't as capable as Chinese industry.

But this was always true. There was never really a time when Western industry was producing as much and as cheaply as China is today - that's the whole point. It makes more sense to diversify away from that, because non-trivial real-world markets will always reward increased variety.

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)

I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level. If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a dec…

It's not the Uber strategy, because there's a physical limit to how efficiently a human can drive another human around the city. The Uber strategy was to push out competitors then bring pricing back up.

Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...

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

#243
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> utterly ruin I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use cutting edge nodes to begin with. Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that would hardly be the en…

> but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? No they don't. Even the US partnerships with TSMC aren't cutting edge. TSMC and arguably Samsung have cutting edge fabs, no one else.

The Intel CMOS process 18A, which they have launched a few weeks ago, is the first after almost a decade that is somewhat competitive with TSMC and Samsung.

Good for Intel: their new manufacturing process has demonstrated a much better energy efficiency than the TSMC "3 nm" process that was used to make Intel Arrow Lake and Intel Lunar Lake.

Unknown: TSMC now has a "2 nm" process and the first products using variants of this process are being launched. It is unknown how TSMC "2 nm" compares with Intel 18A, but it is almost certain that the TSMC "2 nm" is better.

Bad for Intel: they had difficulties to achieve high clock frequencies in Intel 18A in comparison with TSMC "3 nm", so most Panther Lake models have lower clock frequencies than their Arrow Lake counterparts. Moreover, it is also pretty certain that for now Intel 18A has much lower fabrication yields than even the latest TSMC "2 nm" process.

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

#244

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.

Most importantly it's amazing what you can achieve if you can cut the red tape.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the answer to bad regulation to not regulate at all? How EU is regulating isn't the only way to do it. And is bad regulation that much worse than monopoly by the billionaires? There is no distinction. At least with bad regulation you always have the chance to vote better next time. Good luck dealing with oligarchs.

I wish we could regulate the oligarchs away, but it seems to me that is precisely the right amount of regulation that allows for oligarchs to thrive. If you regulate to protect IP owners, and basically make them rentists, you create IP based monopolies and olygarchs. If you also regulate to prevent consumer, worker and industry sector abuse, you end up with a very stagnant economy a la europe. If you don't regulate a…

I have the opposite impression. They thrive where regulation lacks. And I'm not in the very least interested in no regulation because we know precisely what happens. It's another 29, dot-com bubble, housing crash waiting to happen.

Edit: of course regulation isn't a panacea. If the government is already ran by an oligarchy chances are laws will favor them. I'm talking about the kind of laws produced by functional democracies. So we also need to talk about how to make democratic institutions stronger first, then we can rely on regulation.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to note, those aren't the fastest SD cards, those are the fastest UHS-II SD cards. The future is SD Express and you can already get microSDs at 900 MB/s.

SD expires cards are still on my watch list after seeing this https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22665216/sd-express-card-s... . But even then, that's only 3x faster, so you're still putting down 71 ish (I think my original number was 213.33) cards, which means 71 PCIe PHYs and NVMe stacks.

Get a PCIe 4 model and then you're at 35, and that's microSD doing that speed so 35 microSD is pretty compact.

For a thought experiment that's not even optimized for speed, that's pretty good.

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship. That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.

Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc. That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader pro…

That is actually bullshit fed to you all democracies that have been brought down in the last 60-70 years democracies have been brought down by the west. And most dictatorships propped up by them unless they threatened Israel or were perceived a threat to Israel. It was not civil liberties or any such reason that any moves were made it was about capitalism vs socialism or Israel. West capitalists have no interest in civil liberties or democracies hence they bring down any socialist democratic party or leader which has bring about fascists in power in the west.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron. The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chines…

This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny. "Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and…

> Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations

This is the official US justification. This does not mean that is also true.

The Huawei sanctions happened immediately after Huawei had shown their next generation CPU for smartphones, which was better than the next generation CPU shown by Qualcomm, and also immediately after market surveys announced that Huawei will become in a few months the world leader in the smartphone market, in front of Samsung.

When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation. The beneficiaries have been mainly Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The US sanctions were exactly what they needed, the only thing that could stop their competition.

The accusation of dealing with Iran and the blackmailing of Huawei by arresting the daughter of the CEO in Canada, are probably based on true facts, but they have probably been known for many years and they have only been exposed at that time in order to legally justify the sanctions, but due to the timing and consequences of the sanctions it is completely implausible than the old deals with Iran were their real motivation. After all, USA has also made deals with Iran, when they had the interest to do this, and they have not sanctioned themselves in such a way that would affect world economy in unrelated markets. When USA forces citizens of other countries to lose money by buying more expensive smartphones, because there is lower competition, how exactly does this hurt Iran?

The sanctions against the makers of memory devices did not have any credible "national security" motivation, despite the official claims.

> "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data

I am too lazy to search now for quotations, but some time before the announcement of the US sanctions there were published prognoses for the future market share of YTMC, which was projected to grow very fast, after they had announced a new generation of more dense SSDs, which they were willing to sell at lower prices, to get market share. The fact that Apple has stopped their plans to use YTMC as supplier, a short time before the announcement of the sanctions, does not prove anything, except that the Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome.

> "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution.

I agree with what you said about the present causes of the memory price increases. However, that has nothing to do with what I have said, which did not contain any misattribution.

What I have said is that if an increased competition on the memory market would not have been prevented by the US government, today we would have had more vendors and more diverse vendors on this market. In such a market, a deal like that of Altman and the other deals for exclusive contracts with the memory vendors would have had a much less impact. So great price increases would not have happened, because the other vendors would have been eager to step in and increase their market share. The memory market would have been much more stable. Now, in markets with 2, 3 or at most 4 vendors that matter, just a few exclusive contracts are enough to destabilize the market.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.

I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.

>I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.

We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.

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

#250

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.

This has nothing to do with 5 year plans, but with having a functional and competent government enable to enact a coherent long term policy.

In western countries every couple of years we elect a new clown show, which then proceeds to destroy whatever the last clown show tried to accomplish. That has happened again and again for decades, truly awesome "our democracy".

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