Apple to Raise Prices Due to Memory Chip Crunch | Hacker News Reader

Apple to Raise Prices Due to Memory Chip Crunch

wsj.com

42 pointsfoobarqux19 comments

Apple has historically been able to keep prices the same even when everyone expected them to increase. Not a great sign that even Apple, with supply/pricing usually locked up years in advance, has to raise prices.

I thought they fabbed RAM on-chip.

No, they're regular LPDDR dice from one of the big manufacturers that are mounted on the same package as the SoC.

Is there a citation for this? I've found that the majority of Google searches tend to gloss over this hardware detail.

You can physically tell from how the chips look like.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+Mini+(2024)+Chip+ID/178986

Hah, I don't have enough experience to infer that. Do you mean by the orange rectangles in the image? It says two Micron brand SDRAMs.

And looking closely is that some kind of mounting bracket? They look like metal handles surrounding the square area.

Yeah, the point is that the orange chips are not Apple DRAM or TSMC DRAM; they're Micron DRAM. The same stuff that every company is fighting over.

The process used for RAM and the process used for the cutting edge microprocessors are nothing alike, so it’s physically impossible to have the same piece of silicon have both DDR RAM and the CPU. You’re not really going to find a citation to something this well known. Literally every phone, for instance, has “unified memory” with the RAM die stacked on top of the CPU die, as well.

The problem there is that Apple's marketing speak of "unified memory" creates different and confusing connotations.

It is not as surprising that modern chips stack or tile dies together, such as on phones and the like.

edit: Note also there is historical precedent for specialized SoCs that integrate DRAM on the same ASIC, see eDRAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDRAM

Your argument also require the reader knowing the technical premises that CPU and RAM processes are different nm, and that processes of different nm cannot be done on the same chip. These are not obvious or even absolute facts to anyone.

Actually a good place to find these sorts of citations are tech magazines that explain these new things, maybe like Ars Technica used to (i.e., a piece on "What is Apple's unified memory"), or else in academic research that sometimes studies contemporary chips, their research papers might have a blurb discussing the actual hardware architecture of such and such company's design. Or maybe there's an EETimes piece discussing Apple Silicon technology in one of their back issues, e.g. in trade journal literature.

So, what is well known varies depending on the audience. It is both plausible, and appropriate, for technological ambiguities and details to be explicitly discussed and clarified, either by the maker or by other journalists and writers.

And finally, consider also what is well-misknown. If you go online and look, lots of lay comments since Apple Silicon really do believe they are literally the same IC chip. So you have to ask how did that come to be?

> The problem there is that Apple's marketing speak of "unified memory" creates different and confusing connotations.

Unified memory has nothing to do with them being on the same chip… it just has to do with them being the same pool of memory shared between cpu and gpu. Apple marketing is pretty clear on that too. The only reason it’s unique is that doing unified memory on laptops is kinda unheard of until then. It’s been the standard on tablets and phones for years.

Every Intel laptop with integrated graphics has been unified memory, all the way back to ye olde 915 in 2004 at least.

Yes and no. There is sharing of RAM with IGPs from AMD and Intel, but my understanding is the way Microsoft handles the RAM sharing isn't quite as 'unified' as with MacOS. It's not a difference in hardware really, but a software implementation. Also, when we're talking about older Intel/AMD IGP solutions, the graphics cards paired really couldn't take advantage of larger amounts of RAM.

Something like the new Strix Halo stuff from AMD is actually useful with larger amounts of RAM, and basically is the same as the Apple architecture.

No; that’s absurd to say it’s physically impossible, it is absolutely possible to etch whatever arbitrary pattern into a physical substrate, physics pending. What is true is that the CPU and DRAM fabrication processes are very unalike, one uses highly complex patterning for the logic, the other uses many blocks repeated for memory, and can be done on a higher process node as it does not require the same intricacy's. It’s not cost efficient to use logic fabrication to make memory. And you won’t get the yield with highly complex patterning for logic from something that is meant to stamp out the same DRAM block billions of times.

So one day, when we have process nodes far smaller what we do today, a DRAM fab can print highly complex patterning for logic, compatible to today’s CPUs on die. And the logic fabs will be making cpus many times more complex than that. Because economics.

> No; that’s absurd to say it’s physically impossible, it is absolutely possible to etch whatever arbitrary pattern into a physical substrate, physics pending.

Logic processes do not have the capabilities to even manufacture DRAM. It’s not about cost or yield, they just do not have the correct blocks to make DRAM. The processing to make DRAM makes it incompatible with making logic at the current speeds and densities.

There were some much older processes where you could do both, but those are about 10 years old now and we’ve long since moved on. I do not think there will be a future where you can do both.

This question bothers me because I have never found a clear authoritative documentation.

The more detailed sources say, contra the mainstream impression, that Apple Silicon's vaguely-named "unified memory" is technically a hybrid System-on-Chip and System-in-Package architecture. The memory banks DRAM are on a second die (one source said it is made by Samsung), but the RAM controller sits on the CPU die and manages the RAM for the unified memory pool for graphics/main/neural memory usage (hence, "unified" from an ISA perspective). Both IC dies coexists on a shared enclosed package as a single microchip. Technically this is still called a System-on-Chip architecture according to Wikipedia because the electrical engineering definition allows for some parts, such as RAM or I/O, to still exist separately off the main piece of silicon die yet still be called an SoC architecture. In short, it is not a monolithic SoC.

I have tried several times to find citations about this but it is an ambiguous point that is often glossed over, as a kind of hardware abstraction.

so what have consumers gained from the 'A.I' boom ?

kids missing out on games - cz Switch prices went up.

regular joes - consumer hardware went up at least 50% from RAM, SSDs & other components

I guess regular joes gained the ability to 'chat' with a stochastic parrot & vibe code useless things.

We got lot of buggy sloppy softwares.

I probably couldn’t (wouldn’t) run NixOS without it.

Don’t forget senior management salivating about laying you off.

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