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> Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now.

And that company is in Europe, isn't it? The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market: it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.

Yes, but it's not that important. Any complex high-tech product requires suppliers from all over the world. For example, I bet the EU company depends on a lot of China companies critically. Just like any airliner is produced by pretty much the whole world.

> The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market:

You can't just get into RAM manufacturing overnight whenever you feel like it, like you're building washing machines. You need a lot more than just ASML machines, you need the supply chain, the IP, the experienced professionals with know-how, the education system, the energy, the right regulations, etc.

The EU exited the RAM manufacturing business a long time ago when RAM prices sunk, see Qimonda, meaning it would be a long, expensive uphill battle to get back in, and currently EU has no major semiconductor manufacturing ambitions, or ambitions in commodity hardware manufacturing of any kind, so that's not gonna happen.

Of course, RAM is no longer a commodity right now, but nobody can guarantee it won't be again when the AI bubble burst and RAM prices crash, so spinning up the know-how, manufacturing facilities and supply chains from the ground up just for RAM is insanely expensive and risky and might leave you holding the bag.

> it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.

Except semiconductor manufacturing DOES require cheap labor relative to the high degrees of skills and specialization needed at that cutting edge. Unlike in Taiwan, skilled STEM grads in the EU (and even more in the US) who invest that time and effort in education and specialization, will go to better paying careers with better WLB like software or pharma, than in hardware and semi manufacturing that pays peanuts by comparison and works you to death in deadlines.

Also, profitable semi manufacturing requires cheap energy and lax environmental regulations, which EU lacks. So even more compounding reasons why you won't see too many new semi fabs opening here.

> nobody can guarantee it won't be again

I hope we (Europe) can try some things even when they are not guaranteed to succeed and generate huge profits. Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.

The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.

>I hope we (Europe) can try some things even when they are not guaranteed to succeed and generate huge profits.

If EU hopes were cookies, I would have died of obesity 100 times over. EU is bad at learning from its own mistakes and being proactive on rapid changes on the world stage, that's why it's share of global GDP has dropped by half in 20 years. EU is always reactive and then only when it's far too late and its actions are always limp-dicked("we are monitoring the situation"). See the rise of US tech, Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, rise of Chinese EVs, etc

>Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.

We already are toast for the long run, we just ignore it via printing more money and going into more debt, while kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with the fallout. EU's biggest economies are working around the clock on how to fund the ever growing pension and welfare deficits, how to beat Russia, and how to stop people from voting right wing, not on how to claw back and on-shore cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing.

>The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.

Yeah but someone still needs to pay for that and take a risk. And EU investors don't like risking billions of their money to try out new things that are in competition with Asia on manufacturing because we cannot compete there. Labor costs too high, regulations too high, energy costs too high, environmentalism too high, we miss critical know-how. That's why nobody is investing in EU fabs and instead in other things that guarantee higher returns like services, pharma and weapons.

I think we mostly agree. Just "no RAM factories because we have more competitive advantage elswhere" is different than "no RAM factories because they are not guaranteed a profit". Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed? Less risk because we are better positioned is something else, and actually makes sense.

>I think we mostly agree. Just "no RAM factories because we have more competitive advantage elswhere" is different than "no RAM factories because they are not guaranteed a profit".

But then people shouldn't moan that the EU is absent from the RAM manufacturing industry or pretend like it's something easy they could do on a whim if the EU suddenly wanted to.

>Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed?

There will always be sick people and people killing each other.

> There will always be sick people and people killing each other.

Any given drug or weapon can still fail or not make a profit. As well it could be said that computers will still need memory for the foreseeable future. You're not keeping a coherent position in this discussion, just replying with cool soundbites.

> In 5-10 years

and waiting for 5-10 yrs for a lower price is a long wait for consumers.

If food prices were high, would you say to the starving person to wait for 5-10yrs for food?

Thats a ridiculous metaphor. Ram isn't food. Nobody starved to death from insufficient RAM in their computer.

Economies die from lack of produce though.

When the internet boom happened, computers had a tiny fraction of the RAM they have today. Everything worked fine. Programmers had to make efficient programs. But we were fine with that. We just programmed in C and C++ and shipped small binaries, because what choice did we have? Nobody tried to build desktop software in javascript on top of electron. And nobody built web servers in python.

If all consumer devices only shipped with 1gb of RAM maximum, we'd get over it remarkably quickly. Just about the only times large amounts of RAM is an actual requirement is AI, some data science / simulation, and editing video in 8k. And maybe 3d modelling. Lots of programs we run today are memory hogs for no good reason - like the rust compiler, cyberpunk 2077 and google chrome. But we could make those programs much more memory efficient if we really had to. Cyberpunk wouldn't look as pretty. But nobody would really care.

The economy won't die due to expensive RAM. Programmers will just adapt, like we've always done.

> But nobody would really care.

no, you should say that you personally wouldn't care, but that does not generalize.

People do care, just like people prefer eating better food than just bread and milk. And after having had a taste of the good stuff, people do not want to revert - loss aversion is real.

So if consumer devices regressed back to only having 1gb of ram, they will feel the loss, and they will complain if nothing else. The world of lean, efficient software that require little ram will not return. Programmers (read:companies selling products) will not adapt, but instead, the requirements for computing will become more exclusionary to those with the means.

Software that uses less RAM isn't necessarily worse, often RAM is wasted purely due to carelessness and because it didn't matter.

Your assertion that a world of lean software won't return is backwards looking; that was all driven by hardware being cheaper than developer effort.

If we now enter a world of AI-enhanced developer effort being cheaper than hardware, perhaps we can have lean efficient software again.

Do you really need EUV for RAM manufacture already ? IIRC RAM and NAND still DUV & EUV is really only used for the most cutting edge GPU & CPU stuff.

>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.

> 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.

Ah. Please check that. Which types of DRAM can be made in a DUV fab? Obviously the older ones, but are those obsolete for new computers. This really matters.

DDR4 and basic HBM is still in high demand right now and that was made before the first EUV fabs came online.

CXMT’s entire portfolio is made without EUV, and CXMT claims to have acceptable yield and performance comparable to other producers.

Keep in mind that the high bandwidths of modern RAM modules aren’t really a property of the RAM cells so much as a property of the read and write circuitry and the DDR or HBM transceivers, and those are a large part of the IP but a small part of the die. There is no such thing as “double data rate” or “high bandwidth” DRAM cells. Even DRAM cells from the 1990s could be read in microseconds. Reading and streaming your fancy AI model weights is an embarrassingly parallel problem and even 1 TB/sec does not even come close to stressing the ability of the raw cells to be read. This in contrast to, say, modern tensor processors where the actual ALUs set a hard cap on throughput and everyone works hard to come closer to the cap.

Take a look at what makes a modern computer with good RAM performance work: it’s the interconnect between the RAM and processor.

From Micron, everything up to their 1-beta node is DUV. Their 1-gamma node they debuted last year is the only EUV node they have. If you bought a Micron-based DDR5 RAM stick a year ago it would have been DUV and you could get those up to DDR5-8000. 1-gamma increases that to DDR5-9200, so if you can live with ~15% less performance DUV is good enough.

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.

DUV machines are ok, but it still takes 2 years to build a clean room factory.

>Are DUV machines cheap and easy to manufacture?

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.