They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
They can start making some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.
They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.
I'm also sure they can go as far as 5nm like SMIC if they really wanted to, since it's strategic for China, but the cost would only be justified if the current cycle lasts long enough.
The problem, however, is IO controller support has been dropped, many new CPUs don't even support DDR4 any more, especially mobile ones.
plus, the ram manufacturer cycle moves and does this all the time.
Atrioc does a really good job explaining these cycles[0]
But the point is that AI demand peaked when the supply was at its lowest which is why we are caught up in this messed up timeline that we live in. And this has sort of happen in the past too and this industries notorious for it (again watch the video, definitely worth it imo)
But still it feels like we are in this atleast for a year or two hard. Micron is iirc like suggesting what hundreds of billions of $ in factory investment right now and saying that the fastest might open in early 2027
Some estimates 2028 idk, I do feel like the chances of AI bubble popping around this time are likely too.
But still for atleast 1-2 years, we either as consumers or as small vps providers (yes the people who create vps providers are same people like you and me) are absolutely f*ed and the question is around that imo.
[0] The AI Tax Has Started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nipeaKC3dWs
And that will ultimately buy China a lot of time to shove their ram into the market cutting ram manufacturers out of most non-US markets.
I think the major memory manufacturers are simply banking on their ability to flood the market if worst comes to worse. That or I could see some standards trickery around DDR6 (or some new BS standard). It'd not shock me if they coordinated with AMD/Intel to keep the standard secret as long as possible simply give themselves a lead in production.
The ram pricing is coming directly from manufacturers.
Eh, I don't think we were on the same planet then. Even post crypto pre-AI GPUs were far more expensive than they were before said crypto. We just got used to paying $1000 for a mid tier cards.
3D DRAM is no magic, it will only give them maybe 2 generations' breathing room if they got the required etching equipment figured out. But others will be doing 3D DRAM with EUV by then.
This destroys all the AI companies, and more.
Micron Fab 6 currently makes about 2% of global memory production in Virginia.
The plant is currently being expanded and upgraded to Micron's 1a node.
>CXMT has begun mass production of DRAM using a D1z (sub-16nm) process.
https://www.globalsmt.net/advanced-packaging/decoding-cxmt-d...
They call it "10nm class" later in the article.
It's hard to find much concrete info tbh.
Which suits the rest of the world just fine. More for the rest of us, and if the single-digit-percent portion of their market that the US represents wants to lock itself out, no skin off anyone else's nose.
likely naive question: why it is a problem? I would be fine if RAM in my PC has 10 times larger physical size if it is overall cheaper.
I guess that larger may have more power draw, but given costs of RAM and electricity and power draw of RAM it sounds unlikely to be a problem.
At a high end it would run into real-estate prices - at some point using half of room for computer stops making economical sense, given costs of rent or buying flat space. But just doubling size of PC does not sound like a bad tradeoff if it would be say 20% cheaper. Or 50% cheaper.
Is it about not fitting existing motherboards?
Is there reason why they cannot just make memories physically larger? It is "only" 40%, not 40000%
They don't currently have the tech to compete on HBM3 production, but they can produce DDR5 memory, and they will undoubtedly be scaling up production on this.
And? That's good enough. My daily driver desktop, which I use to do development, plus play a few games (FC5, Dirt Rally, etc) has 16GB DDR3.
For 90% of computers in use today, including laptops, that RAM you call obsolete is fine.
Users aren't going to complain that a document which takes 3s to open now takes 3.5s
What you need as far as RAM goes, to make the computer perform acceptably is capacity. Users get a bigger performance boost by going from 8GB RAM to 16GB Ram and from 16GB Ram to 32 GB RAM than from DDR3 to DDR4 or from DDR4 to DDR5.
These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?
The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
Look at what happened to Crucial. Why would Micron axe it's whole consumer RAM division if it was just experiencing a temporary drop in DRAM supplies until new fabs were brought online? Samsung and SK Hynix may have changes in priorities in the coming years, and in the case of Samsung I'm sure they'll still make sure to supply sufficient DRAM chips for the devices it manufactures (phones, TVs, etc...) but Micron has made it's current intentions fairly clear. They'll probably work with OEMs, but they're unlikely to return to selling to the general public any time soon.
Crucial had one of the best marketing positions in the business:
- They had a captive supply chain. There was no risk they'd switch from Samsung to Hynix chips but keep the same SKU, so you could buy a second set later and expect it to have similar timings.
- They had a reputation for being conservative about their offerings. There's a lot of RAM out there that meets rated timings only with a voltage right on the edge of what the memory controllers will start to burn out at.
- They were on a lot of mainboard manufacturer's qualification lists, and yet were easily obtained (at least in the US). There are a fair number of brands and ranges that simply aren't widely distributed.
So they were in a place to say "we can charge 10% more for confidence", and considering enthusiasts willingly pay 30% more for RGB and fancy heatspreaders, that's not a bad message. I mean, I've had competent results with plenty of other brands (I have a Team set in my main rig, and it replaced a G.Skill one before the RAMpocalypse), but I always thought of Crucial as a brand you'd use if you were building a machine for work or a family member and didn't want to deal with surprises.
RAM from China already works and as Chinese RAM manufacturers scale up there's no reason they can't be competitive on price. Furthermore, it's more than possible for China to catch up technologically as well. Micron is likely to regret pissing off the majority of their customers if Chinese RAM manufacturers start aggressively targeting the market Micron have left behind, how bad this gets for Micron depends on how quickly they pivot back to the general consumer market.
But, hypothetically if they had a ton of previous gen GPUs (so, less efficient) and a ton of intermittent energy (from solar or wind) maybe it could be a good tradeoff to run them intermittently?
Ultimately a workload that can profitably consumer “free” watts (and therefore flops) from renewable overprovisioning would be good for society I guess.
I don't think this makes much sense because the "waste" of hardware infrastructure by going from 99.999% duty cycle to 99% is still only ~1%. It's linear in the fraction of forgone capacity, while the fraction of power costs you save from simply shaving off the costliest peaks and shifting that demand to the lows is superlinear.
Second: Even solar and wind are not really "free" as the capital costs still depreciate over the lifetime of the plant. You might be getting the power for near-zero or even negative cost for a short while, but the power cost advantage will very quickly be competed away since it's so easy to spend a lot of energy. Even remelting recycled metals would need much less capital investment than even a previous-gen datacentre.
That leaves the GPUs. Even previous gen GPUs will still cost money if you want to buy them at scale, and those too depreciate over time even if you don't use them. So to get the maximum value out of them, you'd want to run them as much as possible, but that contradicts the business idea of utilizing low cost energy from intermittent sources.
Long story short: in might work in very specific circumstances if you can make the numbers work. But the odds are heavily stacked against you because typically energy costs are relatively minor compared to capital costs, especially if you intend to run only a small fraction of the time when electricity is cheap. Do your own math for your own situation of course. If you live in Iceland things might be completely different.
Again: it might work, if the math checks out for your specific source of secondhand GPUs and/or solar panels and/or batteries.
What they could do very easily in this market is bring back frickin Optane and hook it up to a modern PCIe bus with modern PCIe performance.
If Intel made an equivalent high bandwidth Optane product, they’d immediately corner the GPU memory market.
Except for RAM from YMTC, which the USA gave a near-death sentence to by placing it on the Dept. of Commerce “Entity List” so no USA-associated business can do business with YMTC now.
We use ASRock Rack servers, mainly because the only option for our industry are OEMs like Supermicro and ASRock. Dell and HPE are non-starters, except for our "storage" offering.
Back in 2019, HPE was a good midrange option. Then came ASRock Rack who obliterated HPE with the X470D4U, relegating HPE to high-end enterprise servers. But also made Ryzen-based VPS hosts including yours truly, BuyVM, et al.
One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
If corporations in western (aligned) countries stopped feeding sovereign wealth funds and private equity with profits and actually invested something maybe they could compete with China more closely, even with whatever shenanigans the CPC get up to with state support.