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- Hacker News
- I saw on Twitter that TSMC has made 1B worth of chips for Apple that they cannot package because of missing memory.
(PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)
by chvid - I just thought… didn’t Intel start as a memory chip company?
Couldn’t intel repurpose some of its fabs (maybe the old ones?) to produce memory?
I’m no expert but… seems like an easy win?
by znpy - Don't really need the EUVs for commodity DRAMs and China has plenty of DUVs capable of 10nm. CXMT's DDR5 is known to use 1z nodes (17nm) vs 1c (10nm) used by the big three -- ie, higher cost, less efficiency, less density.
The big three are also expanding their capacity. IMO, it seems to make more sense to sell equipments to those who could make better, efficient use of them. ASML has a backlog of €38.8 billion and is fully booked for 2027.
by tooltalk - > (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)
Why? High demand and low supply is very good for shareholders and make indexes go up, their goal is not to meet demand, they want exponential qurartly revunes
by vdfs - I thought CXMT already have plenty of capacity - Apple are currently talking to the US government for blessing to buy from them.
Other manufactures like Micron do have aggressive expansion plans, but fabs take a long time to build and bring online - multiple years.
- Hoping all these DCs and AI whatnots turn out to be a flop, so that we’ll get plenty ddr5 at sale price :D
- IIRC this wont be possible as a lot of them aren't being packaged on traditional DDR memory boards. They're being put on things like the MI350X.
I'm sure there will be a ton of standard DDR5 sticks, but not so much from AI-only datacenters.
by esskay - even if they're a flop, you'll be told they're too big to fail. And now, you have to bail them out and buy their HBM instead of paying for your RAM
I hope that China makes up for the capacity that RAM producers are not willing to produce, so that the latter are sent back to the past (with no bailout nor protectionism)
by hinata08 - Why stop at 2027? Why not just declare that you get everything produced by humanity for infinity years?
How is a new business going to compete with incumbents that buy 100% of the necessary components needed to enter the market? Is no one else allowed to compete in this market anymore going forward?
by tacocataco - It's not permanent. It's only this way until the bubble pops.by pizzaiolo
- All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.by tosti
- That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs.
Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.
What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.
by rock_artist - Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.by amelius
- OK I’ll take the bait.
Were devs supposed to optimize RAM for a shortage that might come? I’m guessing you had enough foresight to stockpile RAM?
- Thanks to AI, we can now one-shot convert electron to native apps ;-)by jbverschoor
- https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html
Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive.
Now RAM in the cloud, now you're really paying the Java premium.
by tveita - The boom cycle looks like it's going to last a while, but it never lasts forever. If the current memory manufacturers all conspire to not build more capacity, I'm sure someone else will (eg China).
- CXMT is now producing as much as one of the big three. Only for China, of course.by inigyou
- Keep an eye on this page → https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/by guessmyname
- by m463
- Note to the momentarily shocked: this is in Canadian dollars.by zarzavat
- Amazon has implemented a password system for RAM delivery. You're supposed to give a password to the deliverer before taking delivery of the RAM, and you're not supposed to send the password over the phone at all (although the Amazon delivery guy still called me and asked for it over the phone).by Schlagbohrer
- This is a shame, because now I cannot order from Amazon as orders go to building reception and nobody is going to remember the pin to take delivery.by varispeed
- They did the same for a Samsung Fold phone delivered to me last month (in the US).by beckford
- can u provide some context? what is this trying to solve and how does it solve it? very curious.by prodigycorp
- This is quite common for all high value deliveries across all platforms in India.by Roast
- I've already been burned via amazon a few times recently.
Most recent one I bought a multi-tb hard disk, but got an old multi-gb disk shoehorned into legitimate box. Couldn't just get a replacement - had to buy one for more money since that drive's price had increased.
by m463 - This is normal for every item above ~100EUR delivered by Amazon here in Austria. Never had it happen that they asked for the code without showing me the package in-person first though.by preisschild
- Depending on your location this will happen for any item with a certain value and presumably risk score. It's not a unique decision they made for RAM. Probably happened to your order because the value was high enough and your location, not because it was RAM specificallyby Aurornis
- This is why I'm so hesitant to use AI. There are other reasons (for example: the journey is the fun part, not the destination; and I want to learn not have something done for me), but the pressure AI puts on memory and storage is too much for me. I do use it occasionally, mostly to keep tabs on it and for small problem solving (how do I do this one piece of a query in MySQL, since I'm not a MySQL DBA), but that's it for now, until this memory/storage issue is fixed.by apple4ever