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Comment by goku12 | Hacker News Reader

I understand the issue with all the devices. But what about the rest of the things that depend on these electronics, especially DRAMs? Automotive, Aircraft, Marine vessels, ATC, Shipping coordination, traffic signalling, rail signalling, industrial control systems, public utility (power, water, sewage, etc) control systems, transmission grid control systems, HVAC and environment control systems, weather monitoring networks, disaster altering and management systems, ticketing systems, e-commerce backbones, scheduling and rostering systems, network backbones, entertainment media distribution systems, defense systems, and I don't know what else. Don't they all require DRAMs? What will happen to all of them?

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Industrial microcontrollers and power electronics use older process nodes, mostly >=45nm. These customers aren’t competing for wafers from the same fabs as bleeding edge memory and TPUs.

The world ran just fine on DDR3 for a long time.

Okay, but what about the rest? The ones that aren't embedded in someway and use industrial grade PCs/control stations? Or ones with large buffers like network routers? I'm also wondering about the supply of the alternate nodes and older technologies. Will the manufactures keep those lines running? Was it micron that abandoned the entire retail market in favor of supplying the hyperscalers?

> The ones that aren't embedded in someway and use industrial grade PCs/control stations? Or ones with large buffers like network routers?

Not sure if they require DDR5 but the AI crisis just caused the prices of DDR5 to rise but the market supply of DDR4 thus grew and that's why they got more expensive too

> I'm also wondering about the supply of the alternate nodes and older technologies.

I suppose these might be chinese companies but there might be some european/american companies (not sure) but if things continue, there is gonna be a strain on them in demand and they might increase their prices too

> Was it micron that abandoned the entire retail market in favor of supplying the hyperscalers?

Yes

..DDR3 that's no longer being produced. Why do people just assume old tech to be abundant in supply?

A $100k EV has roughly the same amount of DRAM as a $1k phone.

The EV is a therefore, on a whole, a lot less sensitive to DRAM price increases.

Okay, accepted. But are you sure that the supply won't be a problem as well? I mean, even if these products choose a different process nodes compared to the hyperscalers, will the DRAM manufactures even keep those nodes running in favor of these industries?

What will probably happen is that the reselling market/2nd market of these might probably rise

> will the DRAM manufactures even keep those nodes running in favor of these industries?

Some will, Some might not, In my opinion, the longevity of these brands will only depend if they allow buying ram for the average person/consumer brands so I guess we might see new competition perhaps or give more marketshare to all the other fab companies beyond the main three of these industries.

I am sure that some company will 100% align with the consumers but the problem to me feels that they wouldn't be able to supply enough production to consumers in the first place so prices still might rise.

And those prices most likely will be paid by you in one form or another but it would be interesting to see how long the companies who buy dram from these providers or build datacenters or anything ram intensive will hold their price up, perhaps they might eat the loss short term similar to what we saw some companies do during trump tarrifs.

That is factually wrong.

That might be the case only for the infotainment system, but there’s usually many other ECUs in an EV. The ADAS ECUs are carrying similar amounts as an iPhone or the infotainment system. Telematics is also usually also a relatively complex one, but more towards lower sized amounts.

Then you have around 3-5 other midsized ECUs with relatively high memory sizes, or at least enough to require MMUs and to run more complex operating systems supporting typical AUTOSAR stacks.

And then you have all the small size ECUs controlling all small individual actuators.

But also all complex sensors like radars, cameras, lidars carry some amounts of relevant memory.

I still think your point is valid, though. There’s no difference in orders of magnitude when it comes to expensive RAM compared to an iPhone. But there’s cars also carried lots of low-speed, automotive grade memory in all the ECUs distributed throughout the vehicle.

So how many GB in total for a Tesla, or say a VW EV? Something like 16-32 GB? Is that not roughly like a $1k phone?

For reference, the iPhone 17 Pro (which starts at $1100) has 12GB of RAM.

I cannot say, depends on the vehicle. But easily 50-64GB range.

If there’s three main ECUs at 16GB each, you’re already hitting 50GB. Add 2-4GB for mid size ecus, and anything in between KBs and some MB for small ECUs.

Factually wrong.

That's at least 52 GB.

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