Posted by donohoe 6 hours ago
It's the people and country that suffer when our government fails to ensure markets are free and fair.
Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices.
That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happening. Sometimes things just suck, and somebody bought the world's supply of RAM wafers to use as frisbees.
Samsung is about to hand out ~$26B in bonuses. SK Hynix something similar-ish.
AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.
2. In a healthy, competitive market there would be smaller manufacturers that’d be happy to take up the big guys’ discarded business.
Of course it might be a ploy to sheep-herd consumers and companies towards the expensive DDR-5. I would not put that below the ring of RAM producers.
How much % of the DRAM market do you think is made from computer enthusiasts upgrading their Zen 1/2 CPUs to Zen 3? Note intel and AMD both switched to DDR5 well before the exit from DDR3/DDR4 ("2024-2025", according to the complaint).
While I wouldn't necessarily agree with "a handful of people", the fact is that neither of us can prove their lean -- so no point pursuing that argument thread.
So you might be right that it's a pure numbers/statistics decision. Or I might be right that they want to herd people into the more expensive hardware while forcing them to do so by phasing out production of the cheaper hardware.
No way to truly know IMO. We are exchanging hypotheses.
DDR4 production is likely still quite profitable, just not drowning-in-money AI-bubble profitable. If smaller foundries existed they’d be happy to take up the business.
Maybe really what needs to happen is some busting up of the giants…
Otherwise they could continue to make DDR4 at a higher cost and sold at a higher price to which people will complain price fixing again.
The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.
So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.
If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.
The question is whether there’s enough meaningful demand for aftermarket DDR4 upgrades to make it worthwhile to a manufacturer to keep producing DDR4 instead of switching to HBM and DDR5.
Micron claimed retail is a rounding error, a market not worth serving. So you’d presumably need to find industrial buyers who would be willing to buy DDR4.
They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.
If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.
Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies.
And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.
The thing about the US losing its grip on the world and the collapse of the global world order means that the words on the paper don't mean much. Embargoes on Russia didn't mean much so Europeans are physically taking over their ships and Ukrainians are physically sinking the rest of their ships. In Iran nothing other than physically sinking ships and blowing up places meant anything.
Europeans can ship EUV machines because they are physically building them for people who will use these to physically build the most valuable products currently there is. US wasn't able to enforce its will to Iran, what if Koreans, Europeans and the Chinese decide that its not into their interest to act according to US courts?
There is nothing that stops US from building their own Memory Fabs, or asking / funding Micron building more US Fabs. It will cost a more, but the complexity is certainly no where near replicating TSMC.
lol he is not. at no point was he a syrian. his mom was from ohio or something.
This is as biased an Anti-US take as any. Will not grace the rest of the claims with a response.
They would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?
Corporations avoid picking fights with large nations where lots of revenue comes from for very obvious reasons.
1) This is not good for Korean/Europen sellers, because it negatively affects sales volume, and is unlikely to be compensated by margins, because a good chunk of those will go towards circumvention instead of the original seller.
2) Some more money will go towards replacing those sellers completely. This is extra not good from the sellers perspective.
OpenAI's original corporate agreements capped its returns at 100x, which is seen as too paltry for its current holders, so they scrapped those to prepare for an IPO [0]
That is, in a word, insane.
[0] https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-develo...
Yeah that's how law works. Everyone likes money, but that doesn't mean it's fine to steal money. Yes, even from maligned entities like "big tech" or "private equity"
Furthermore, I think there should be a tax on algorithmic inefficiency, in that if a LLM, frontier or not, consumes more than a certain amount of KWH per token, it should be taxed such as to put emphasis on models than can run locally, on a normal PC
Not like it'd be the first time someone shook a stick at them.
At this point the only hope for change is if China finally decides to get in the game rather than just threatening to.
Nobody ever made good native widgets.
From consumer electronics to the data-center, the rising real mfg costs and lack of supply is putting huge pressure on pricing, and may just drive anyone who cant negotiate with these suppliers out of business.
Once the dominoes start, I fail to see how things recover in less than 3-5 years, not counting all the businesses wiped out in the meanwhile.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...
That's indistinguishable from not wanting to get burned by another semiconductor boom/bust cycle.