Hacker News Reader

Secondary RAM Manufacturing Had Stalled. Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring.

My takeaway, this sounds like an comparably easy fix for the consumer market, if prices are somewhat guarenteed to stay mid term significantly above this years spring floor for someone to sweep up the margins and negotiate a somewhat reliable way to get the last gen production lines up and running again. Will take at least half a year to pick up, but this is not a longterm RAM doomsday scenario in any sense.

I'm more worried about the low to mid-end embedded systems, that a have a dollar budget for memory components, that could get unbearably slow for the current/next gen if manufactures just use the bare minimum of RAM the bloated TV or tablet OS can run on, if the 1GB raspberry move is any indication of that. And consumers stuck with no way to upgrade them to a reasonably usable state.

View on HN