241–250 of 355 posts
I guess something needs to be done about the RAM (and to a degree SSD/NAND) production cartel if it can so easily take hostage a major part of the society & starve it of critically needed components that are needed for a functioning modern society.
If you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it. Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once. If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot. I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.
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The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it I disagree. Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…
This isn't right.
RAM prices (and most components) are very finely balanced between supply and demand. A small shortfall in supply leads to a large increase in price, and a large shortfall in supply leads to very large price increases.
It takes 2 years for an existing RAM supplier to build a new clean room factory to make RAM.
All the RAM manufactures saw this shortage coming 6 months ago.
If you follow the news, the existing manufactures are investing heavily. Here's Hynix annoucements:
Nov 25: Hynix plans 8-fold boost to cutting-edge DRAM production in 2026, https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/sk-hynix-plans-8-fold-bo...
Dec 25: Hynix investing $500B (I guess this is a mistranslation somewhere!!???) in new RAM factories, https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/hot-on-the-heels-of-...
Jan 26: Hynix to spend $13 billion on the world's largest HBM memory assembly plant, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/sk-hynix-to-...
The supply is being built to match the demand. Prices will stabilize, and the manufactures know there is lots of latent demand.
In 2 years time RAM prices for consumers will be normal again (not sure about GPU RAM though!)
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>Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.
Are DUV machines cheap and easy to manufacture? I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market. Maybe some RAM chips don't need EUV lithography. but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.
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>Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.
Are DUV machines cheap and easy to manufacture? I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market. Maybe some RAM chips don't need EUV lithography. but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.
100 million DUV machine is not your limiting factor when a whole fab costs 2-3 billion and requires specialized knowhow that few people in the world have in order to get good yields and be profitable. Otherwise everyone would be making chips if all you needed was to go out and buy a 100 million DUV machine then hit the "print" button to churn out chips like it's a Bambu 3d printer.
>I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market.
Nobody spends 2-3 billion to open new fab just to make commodity low margin chips. New fabs are almost always built for the cutting edge, then once they pay off their investment costs, they slowly transition into making low margin chips as they age out of the cutting edge, but nobody builds fabs for legacy nodes that have a lot of competition and low profitability, except maybe if national security(the taxpayer) would subsidize those losses somehow.
>but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.
You are not.
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Idea: Take the money that Germany promised to Intel if they build a state of the art fab. Instead, ask SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron to build a DRAM fab in Germany.
It may seem that these are very similar processes, but this is only if you do not take into account the bribes from Intel to specific officials and their relatives who make decisions about subsidizing Intel. SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron don't treat good people well enough to give them taxpayer money.
> but this is only if you do not take into account the bribes from Intel to specific officials and their relatives who make decisions about subsidizing Intel.
Brandolini's Law is out of control here. You are making a bold fucking claim. From the tone of your post, it seems pointless to ask if you have any evidence. From and outsider's view, I would say the German political system is much less corrupted by lobbyists compared to the United States. Do you say the same about the CHIPS Act in the United States?
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Aren’t Chinese manufacturers already expanding their capacity? Given that Samsung and SK Hynix have left that market in the pursuit of HBM4 chips, China is going to rule this market. At least that’s what analysts are saying.
Chinese manufacturers like CXMT face the same kinds of issues that Huawei faced in entering the EU market - the EU is clamping down on Chinese suppliers across their supply chain [0]. Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exp…
Australia for example is a large and growing market for Chinese electric cars. China is the biggest export market for Australian raw materials so it doesn't just put random trade barriers up.
There's actually a free trade agreement between Australia and China.