But to your point, that is exactly how American companies like to play now. No one is stopping them from screwing over the consumer.
I have a Micron near me and they are building another chip facility but we are years away still so I suspect China will beat them to the punch.
Basically:
China floods the market with cheaper but less QA'd parts, makes a gazillion dollars, is able to spend said money to fix yields / QA issues and streamline operations, by the time that happens Micron and maybe a few other existing players will have new memory production, and then we'll have a flood of cheap, reliable memory. 4yr, maybe?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-a...
It's quite difficult to make general statements at such a gargantuan scale encompassing every single sector.
China has an abundance of terrific QA in electronics and advanced technologies as much as it has an abundance of the opposite, just simply due to its sheer size.
The US did it when it was a bigger steel supplier, good steel was sold domestically, crappy steel was sold elsewhere. If you got crappy steel in Africa at the time you might have thought US steel was garbage with poor QA, but in reality US steel was great and they just shipped the crappy stuff because people still kept buying it.
My endlessly excellent Chinese gear (Dahua cameras, XikeStor switches, etc) doesn't know what you're referring to.
Seems it's mostly useful for LPDDR modules which are predominantly used in battery-powered devices and to improve margins.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/micron-sampl...
I remember reading about it in Linux contexts decades ago, and these days it's something that Windows does automatically.
When can I expect this flood of cheaper RAM with less QA? I'd like to contribute to the gazillion dollar pile as soon as possible.
SK Hynix and Samsung are South Korean.
The Korean memory makers are playing the same game as Micron and simply moving existing capacity up-market.
GP was referring to upstart Chinese memory manufacturers like ChangXin, who - if their yields manage to catch the wave - could not have asked for a more favorable market after the big 3 have abandoned the consumer segment. Consumers who would have otherwise turned up their noses at CXMT will not have the luxury.
hm interesting
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memo...
However with corsair giving it their blessing, and their technology having matured a bit (a lot?), and more reviews showing good stability (longevity I suppose, is TBD) they're definitely worth recommending these days.
At least we have the CIA to blame on religious fundamentalism.
You really can’t expect the same bureaucratic setup to think in terms of the decade+ it would take to be competent at something like chips
The whole system needs to be dismantled while an alternative system gets built; given the nature of Indian politics (freebies/jobs/reservations to certain groups; monthly stipends to certain groups by borrowing money while at the same time looting public funds), it is impossible.
The Indian Government is heavily pushing for domestic capabilities.
To understand why India failed to replicate the Chinese or East Asian model, I recommend A Sixth of Humanity by Devesh Kapoor and Aravind Subramanian.
India needs to first figure out the absolute basics
I had a similar view to you ~2 weeks ago. Spending some time there very quickly made me realize that there’s a lot of other things that are much more pressing.
Higher education want to move or distant themselves from the poor, dirty or just caste separation.
If you have the feeling that certain things are not your problem, you are not rising.
China is very far away from flooding the DRAM market.
China doesn't have EUV fabs... They've pushed DUV impressively far... but until they get EUV working industrially (and reasonable timelines are at least 2-4 years for that) it shouldn't be possible for them to compete for that market.
> China is the great equalizer of the world.
China is hardly an egalitarian society...
Another way China is a great equalizer is their willingness to do business with anyone that can pay.
Chinese per-capita emissions have peaked at lower level than US and are already falling.
drop the bs
Nations often impose trade barriers for various reasons. This is a very old tactic.
If you think that South Africa is absolutely egalitarian, you're wrong.
If you think that Norway is absolutely egalitarian, you're also wrong.
But if you think that "South Africa is egalitarian" is as wrong as "Norway is egalitarian", then your views are more wrong than both of them combined.
To state that no country is absolutely egalitarian does not mean that "China is hardly egalitarian" has to be wrong. And even if some other country (say Norway) were to be as hierarchical as China, that would not disprove the claim that China is hardly egalitarian. It would just mean there exist other inegalitarian countries too.
India is not even trying despite its size and we as germans do not push the EU as a union.
Does this not count as soon? How often do you buy new computers? That seems pretty soon. I remember a year or few ago being told it'd never happen so they're already infinity years ahead of schedule if we accept that as reasonable. The rate they're pulling ahead of expectations appears to be so sharp there is a risk they leapfrog EUV to go on to the next big thing.
Would’ve been nice if the United States had built a rail system to north to Alaska or even a rail system to Chile to the south?
I guess doing things like that are hard to do when you’re busy fighting multiple wars since the early 1950s.
The big three memory makers will probably face their last big payday. I hope they enjoy it, as China will dominate the global memory market in three-five years due to their short term greed.
Apple will likely bring memory in-house, like they did with CPUs and GPUs. Anyone questioning the time it took to replace Intel and Qualcomm should consider the Chinese expansion in the memory market, which makes it a long-term necessity.
Apple has the money, and while its competitors have spent/squandered $1 trillion on the AI data center fiasco. Apple made a decision to stay away from the blast crater.
Meanwhile Apple which also has the expertise in engineering and chip design can do what is necessary and bring memory in house. Note: Nvidia and Broadcom have also been replaced along the way by Apple also.
Who knows maybe Intel will condescend to do memory too?
There is a certain amount of capacity to produce memory. They are building new facilities but it takes a long time. They have been burned going down this route many times in the past (e.g., losing money, firms that are no longer in business).
What would you have them do instead?
Thanks, please give my regards to Kash Patel.
And I know you don’t care about it. It’s understandable because you have your own concerns to devote to. Never mind. But just don’t put all these stuff in a simple way. Please remember the problems beneath those achievements are much more and make a larger numbers of people suffered than those who are benefited through those achievements.
I guess we might have more similarities than disagreements if those issues are abstracted out the country level.
Normal people who have to wait for an event were doctors do free health care in a sport gym for a handful of days.
Up until 2005, roughly 10% of the population couldn't even access healthcare, at which point the PRC built out more care centers and invested in training more doctors, but there's still a significant shortage, such that scalpers sell outpatient appointment tickets for 10-15x markup over the actual appointment cost.
There's plenty of ways the two countries are different, but healthcare seems like an odd choice to try to "one-up" the US on, even if its programs like medicare, medicaid, social security disability and others still leave gaps.
First of, even per capita, the USA is at 8th place while China is 74.
For sure China has a problem due to its gigantic size and amount of people to even be able to reach its people, but the health care costs are nowere as high as USA has. USA is actually the country with the highgest % of GDP spend for health care alone.
Just checkout a YT video from an US American going to a normal chinese hospital and then compare the bill.
And in parallel the USA is dismantling medicare, medicad and co.
This is also directly reflected in the life expetency: US Americans are getting less old than Chinese people.
China and the US have the same life expectancy of 79 years, which is a very recent phenomenon due to the 2005-2018 changes I mentioned earlier. Obesity, lack of exercise and other cultural factors weigh down the US life expectancy compared to all other Western nations. China's use of abortion during the one child policy era also prevented a lot of people who would have had chronic medical conditions and disabilities from being born.
It is not yet true, however, that Americans are getting "less old", though it may soon depending on how China manages it's own growing obesity problem and tobacco use.
Feel free to us europe than or germany. We pay less and more people are better of than the US Americans.
US Americans pay 2.5 times more than the avg high income nation: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy...
Were is the benefit of paying that much more if you are not getting older than others?
My main argument, which is in my first comment, is that healthcare is a bad way to show the difference between China and the US, since they are actually have a lot of similarities, especially with access at the lower end of the income spectrum.
There's literally no reason to bring other countries into the conversation other than to say "US is bad", which does nothing to change the reality of healthcare access in China.
I'm guessing you are also probably unfamiliar with the terms like "chicken game" which refers to the cutthroat, high-stakes price wars where dominant semiconductor manufacturers intentionally overproduce and slash prices. This is literally how the industry went from dozens to just three majors today since the 80's.
I'm not sure what world we live in when the scheming capitalists are all hunched around their table working out how to dodge selling their products into an enormous price boom. Do they not like money all of a sudden?
The industry is so naturally prone to oversupply that the only stable equilibrium is undersupply. Aggressive expansion kicks off a price war, which immediately undercuts the logic of the expansion.
This only changes with new entrants, which will come, especially from China. But it takes time to build fab capacity, so the medium-term modal outcome is consistent undersupply.
Corsair DDR5 DIMM modules with CXMT RAM started appearing on Friday.
The DRAM fabs have been on a roundabout for 40 years going from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior, to struggling to keep the lights on.
And imo it's not really their fault, it's all the lead time of advanced semiconductors, combined with the commodity dynamics of oil. And the goal is to match that supply to the demand of everything from consumer electronics to more datacenters than you can shake a stick at.
It's maddening to try and solve that, so at this point I really don't fault them for prioritizing survival.
"Accused" makes it sound like these things may still be up in the air, when they very much are not. I would choose instead the much clearer "A number of those involved in DRAM production have a proven history of cartel behavior and price fixing."
For those who may not be familiar with some of the history in this area:
For all I know, maybe they are dumb enough to try and actually coordinate again, my hunch would be no, or they've tried something new and inventive. Like Matt Levine talked about how so many landlords were using the same software to set prices, that one was pretty shady.
But it is interesting where it is popping up at the moment, like power transformers is another area. These companies have lived through these cycles before, and know there is no one to save them if they overleverage and get it wrong.
In the past when memory supply was short and then rebounded, many companies went out of business because making memory was no longer profitable.
The companies have two choices. They either produce RAM cheaply and in large quantities, or they get replaced by someone who will produce RAM cheaply and in large quantities. Current incumbents are free to pick which of those two scenarios they prefer.
Memory in particular ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
The entry-cost to getting into memory is on the order of $billions and years - you can do just about anything...
Increasing the availability doesn't mean decreasing the price ... people think those are intrinsically related - not so much.
You can get a prada shirt for $2,000 ... as many as you'd like, for $2,000 a piece. No problem. They'll make the factories go burr all night long. Still $2,000.sweeping
There's a bunch of things like this. $100 bills for instance ...
a new entrant might yield a price drop, or, it might not.
> why not? i'm sure they can jump into the hustle.
Except... Maybe they don't need to. Demand is outstripping supply right now. Competing on availability may be sufficient
You can easily see this on a mini-macro scale with popular restaurants. Often a restaurant with an equivalent menu and prices will open nearly adjacent to a very popular place and can sustain itself simply because you don't have to wait an unacceptable length of time to be seated
If it costs you $1B and five years to build out new supply and you think demand will not sustain for more than three years, it does not make sense to expand supply.
Instead you will maintain your margins currently and await demand to decrease back to your current supply.
This is pretty common and as others have pointed out is even more common in markets where competition is slow and lead times are long.
Ammunition is a great example over the last decade or so as political turnover caused relatively short lived demand spikes and manufacturers didn't expand supply because they knew once political winds shift, demand would decrease.
What?! If they did an anti competitive agreement sure. Otherwise no as each supplier is incentivized to produce more than its competitor and less than the demand, while divesting just enough to survive the oversupply risk.
The thing is they tend to only do that when they can get a technological competitive advantage. The priority access gives them a locked in competitive edge, for a while. It’s not clear there is an opportunity like that in memory.