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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Not just DRAM market, but the GPU market soon. China is the great equalizer of the world.

> Not just DRAM market, but the GPU market soon

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...

The future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed. China will mass produce something to the point that it is widely distributed. That is how China acts as a great equalizer on a global scale.

Another way China is a great equalizer is their willingness to do business with anyone that can pay.

China is willing to do business while giving zero fucks about the environment they are destroying and the global warming they are causing. It really blows my mind people support the china thing so much around here.

China is deploying more renewables than most of the world, in some calculations outspending the rest of the world.

Chinese per-capita emissions have peaked at lower level than US and are already falling.

According to whom?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

USA 14.2

Canada 13.42

China 8.66

Per capita is not a useful metric in this measurement. Why is that such a theme?

Bruh, When there's no data, you ask, "According to whom?" When you have data, you ask, "Why is that such a theme?"

...why wouldn't it be? Who cares if e.g. Greenland has near-zero total emissions if nearly nobody lives there? Emissions are a cost of human existence, of course absolute emissions should scale with population.

Do you think that OpenAI or Google gives any fucks?

extremely hard to argue we give a fuck about the environment.

drop the bs

Isn't any other significant economy willing to do business with anyone that can pay?

No, most of the rest of the large developed economies have some standards (e.g. against buying conflict minerals) and sanctions against certain regimes. China is quite happy to ignore that if they can get away with it.

Right, go ahead and import Cuban cigars, Iranian oil, and Chinese electric cars.

Nations often impose trade barriers for various reasons. This is a very old tactic.

> but until they get EUV working industrially (and reasonable timelines are at least 2-4 years for that)

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.

How much does the node size matter for dram? My understanding was that it’s been marginal gains on sram since about 7nm TSMC. I would naively expect the capacitor size requirements not to shrink as well as logic, does the smaller transistor make up for the lower capacitance, or do they have to run at higher frequencies and refresh more frequently?

Not an egalitarian society, but their companies have a honey-badger like mentality from what I have read, where they ruthlessly reduce costs and margin down past where non-Chinese companies cannot compete.

China is better than USA in this regard though and the only other superpower able to challange the USA.

India is not even trying despite its size and we as germans do not push the EU as a union.

But they do build infrastructure, usable, infrastructure, ever already built that railway all the way to Tehran, and once the war is over between Ukraine and Russia, they almost certainly will build high speed rail all the way to Europe.

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.

There are no egalitarian societies. Societies in the west favour the super rich and believing anything else is simply delusional. Sorry to burst the bubble.

To paraphrase Asimov:

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.

No one says that China is an egalitarian society lmao. Where did you get the idea?

The thing about China is that they will iterate and iterate some more until they get there and then once there, well like BYD they will disrupt the entire market the cozy days of resting on your laurels for the American/Korean memory companies is over.

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?

"short term greed"

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?

Not really sure if I'd describe what China has done to various manufacturing sectors as "equalizing".

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