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Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

investors.micron.com

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Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#271

Post by squigz »

lenkite wrote: post #270
squigz wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am guessing you purely stick to the mobile-phone/corpo-laptop crowd then ? Finding PC enthusiasts should not be that difficult. They are legions of them all over the world - not just in the developed nations. No. I'm a PC enthusiast myself, as are most of those people I know. I run an online (PC) gaming community. > (Though admittedly most people nowadays just buy online and local hardware markets are shutting do…

Then I misunderstood what you were saying. PC community has actually increased over last few years as people have become dissatisfied with the big-2 consoles.

I was questioning the assertion that a vast majority of gamers buy their components from physical stores as opposed to ordering online.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#272

Post by lenkite »

squigz wrote: post #271
lenkite wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I misunderstood what you were saying. PC community has actually increased over last few years as people have become dissatisfied with the big-2 consoles.

I was questioning the assertion that a vast majority of gamers buy their components from physical stores as opposed to ordering online.

Yes, this is the sad trend excepting for some markets that circumvent paying tax or the markets in the manufacturing cities.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#273

Post by throwaway2037 »

linguae wrote: post #139

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals…

It is interesting that your comment made no mention of single board computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi. These are the more likely future of hobbyist computing as the price to develop custom PCBs is lower than ever. Yes, you need to buy the components, but it will come a day where you shop by parts then some LLM arranges the parts on an SBC. Finally, you review the the PCB layout, and click a button to place an order with PCBWay or a competitor. X days later a tiny board appears at your house exactly built to spec and runs Linux. The coolest part: The cost is so low that millions and millions of more (young) people can join the hobbyist computing party.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#275

Post by qalmakka »

jmward01 wrote: post #95

I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.

There's a huge difference between "AI" and "tech bros and finance guys getting amazed by an LLM that talks back to them without realising it's just a language model and not intelligence, so they started chucking the massive piles of cash they had lying around the world to evade taxes to them in a pyramid scheme of colossal scale". We currently are heading more and more towards the latter, and when it crashes it will sow so much distrust and curse the "AI" name so much that we'll probably get a decades-long AI winter after that. In the end none of this nonsense will help the world towards getting better AI any time soon.

Already most "AI researchers" outside of the big corps have basically turned in the last 3 years from "people training their models and doing research" to "webdev plugging into other people's APIs to use LLMs they don't know crap about". When, not if, the big AI bubble bursts, the damage done to the sector will be immense

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#276

Post by rvdca »

0manrho wrote: post #221
khhu2bnn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things. Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.

That's not how it works. Crucial winding down doesn't mean that there's less flash fabs in the world, just like there are plenty of DRAM companies that sell to the consumer market that don't have their own flash fabs (Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc). Those consumer oriented brands bought flash from Micron (not crucial), SK (also doesn't have a consumer facing DRAM brand), and Samsung. That's just as true today as it will…

I am not sure if I understood your comment correctly but from my stand point Sk Hynix definitely has a consumer facing brand : https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#xcx=0&m=444

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#277

Post by croes »

jmward01 wrote: post #95

I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.

At the moment AI is to me like the debunked assumption of the existence of the Moai on Easter Island.

We cut down our trees to build more AI datacenter sculptures to please the AI gods.

Or the nuclear craze of 50s where radioactuve material where stuffed in everything like toothpaste, cream etc.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#278

Post by xp84 »

xethos wrote: post #234
mh- wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.

In Canada, BC's lower mainland (and parts of Ontario, Alberta, and a few others I can't speak of first-hand) have both Memory Express and Canada Computers. We used to have NCIX as well, though they've left (at least) BC

I think NCIX left the realm of the living entirely

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#279

Post by throwup238 »

linguae wrote: post #139

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals…

> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?

Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes.

Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#280

Post by PaulRobinson »

linguae wrote: post #139

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals…

I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago.

I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone.

So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.

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