[HN Gopher] CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the ...
___________________________________________________________________
CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing
market rate
Author : phront
Score : 230 points
Date : 2026-02-21 14:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.koreaherald.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.koreaherald.com)
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| More competition is always good
| mrweasel wrote:
| This feels like a classic business blunder. Focus hard on a
| single business segment, leaving an opening in the market for
| your competitors. Not because it wasn't profitable, but because
| it wasn't profitable enough for you, right now. Only downside is
| that now you've created an opening for a new player in the
| market.
|
| This feels like a short coming of western business/stock market
| thinking. Focusing on profit within the next few quarters, and
| not caring about the longer term consequences. For all it's flaws
| and shady business practises at least China can think beyond a
| single fiscal year.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Ok but this is how the market is supposed to work. If the
| incumbents aren't doing what their customers want, then
| competitors can rise and fill the gap and compete.
|
| This isn't a shortcoming, it's a competitive market working as
| intended.
| delecti wrote:
| The market doing what it's supposed to do does not negate
| that the market segment has only been left open because of
| overly myopic businesses.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| That's what modern capitalism _is_ and it 's bad for
| everyone
| qup wrote:
| Why would we think businesses will always make the right
| move?
|
| They'll blunder. They'll do it even harder in the absence
| of competition.
| delecti wrote:
| Who said I thought businesses would always make the right
| move?
|
| Businesses blunder. "The market" is just a set of
| observations, including that competitors will tend to
| take advantage of those blunders. It is not a failure of
| the market that businesses have blundered, nor surprising
| that it will happen occasionally, and neither I nor
| mrweasel implied otherwise.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| The market is actively trying to solve it right now. Micron
| is investing $200B in new fabs. Everyone is trying to ramp
| up production.
|
| Yes, identifying a problem is easy. But solving shortages
| in all cases requires perfect knowledge of future demand.
| So, good luck.
| PearlRiver wrote:
| Everyone gets mad when Chinese do capitalism...
| bigyabai wrote:
| "Why is nobody berating China?" is my favorite oft-repeated
| refrain on HN.
| ta9000 wrote:
| They're too busy berating the US.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| NO you see, we have to hate Chinese companies because they
| are unfair competitors since they get state funding from
| the Chinese government, unlike Intel, Micron, TSMC, ASML,
| Samsung who don't get state funding from the US, EU,
| Taiwan, ROK ... oh wait.
|
| Scratch that, we have to hate Chinese companies because
| they do business with the Chinese military, unlike Intel,
| Nvidia, Samsung who don't do business with the US and ROK
| military ... oh wait.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| I know you are being sarcastic but the reason why we have
| to hate Chinese is simply because the standard of living
| of Americans depends on China not succeeding, simple as
| that.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Well then hey can just say THAT, instead of coming up
| with hypocritical BS that doesn't pass the smell test.
| People internationally have enough IQ to see through the
| double standards BS, especially since youtube is a thing.
|
| And the standard of living of working class Americans has
| been on a steady decline since Reagan by the hand of US
| administrations, not by the hand of CHina.
|
| This isn't defending anyone's standard of living, it's
| defending profits of domestic monopolies like Micron, who
| indulge in state subsidies from US taxpayers and then
| fuck then over on prices.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Does it, though? If anything it seems like the opposite:
| China's success had directly enabled my standard of
| living as an American to be as high as it is.
|
| I suppose it'd be true that the standard of living of
| _some_ Americans depends on China not succeeding --
| specifically, those Americans who own corporations
| competing with Chinese firms -- but I think they 'll
| survive just fine with only 10 yachts instead of 15.
| assaddayinh wrote:
| Lets not forget there is no competitors. There is one
| competitor- the chinese state, one huge company willing to
| subsidize any endeavor that will help it fmgain more
| marketshare with already captured markets.
| 127 wrote:
| Only if you don't want or need any geopolitical gradient at
| all.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| CXMT sells the vast majority of their bits at the prevailing
| market rate, just like everyone else. They are adding capacity
| as quickly as they can, with a 5-10 year planning horizon, just
| like everyone else. It's really not that deep!
| orphea wrote:
| > They are adding capacity as quickly as they can [...], just
| like everyone else
|
| Are you sure? In the past they explicitly said they are not
| going to increase production.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-
| maker...
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Yes of course their messaging to customers and the
| investment community is that they will be rational and
| measured in their investments. In reality, they are adding
| capacity as quickly as possible as margins are too high.
| However, capacity addition leading edge semiconductor
| manufacturing has a multi-year lead time.
| overfeed wrote:
| > In reality, they are adding capacity as quickly as
| possible [...]
|
| Even if we ignore the fact that you can't build out
| factories in secret, this would be securities fraud by
| publicly listed companies.
|
| > ...as margins are too high
|
| This is not the first RAM boom-bust cycle, and memory
| makers are an actual cartel convicted of coordinating in
| the past - none if them are going to break rank when they
| can invest the minimum and reap outsized benefits. Also,
| no one wants to invest in additional capacity when the
| bottom can fall out at anytime, and shareholders demand
| your head- not even the AI companies want to bear that
| risk, which is saying something.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| PRC asked them to curtail DDR4 production so they didn't
| bottom out the market a year or two ago, and to focus on
| latest gen development, like HBM. They were the world
| leader in cost efficient DDR4 production at the time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not really a blunder though. Given that total capacity is
| tightly constrained, Samsung and SK Hynix are happy to focus on
| what they do at their best and with the highest margins. Why
| shouldn't they supply the HBM market?
| overfeed wrote:
| It's putting all eggs in one basket. If/when the higher-
| margin category collapses, they'll have no fallback. Imagine
| Chevrolet had discontinued Impalas and other low-margin cars,
| and switched to Corvettes during the pandemic
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Even if there's a collapse in the high-margin market (I
| don't think anyone is expecting this right now), it will be
| slow and telegraphed in advance, giving them plenty of time
| to refocus on lower-margin products.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Good description of what actually happened. Do they even
| sell any conventional 2-door passenger cars besides the
| Corvette these days?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Maybe not to starve whole segments of the society and economy
| of critical inputs ?
|
| This is why we have strategy reserves - to avoid greedy
| companies to make a quick buck when they find out they can
| sell the equivalent of crack and dump all the other now low
| margin stuff like food or other essentials.
|
| Sure, that company might make a killing for a short while,
| but people will die from hunger, missing medicine or freeze
| to death.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| So let's buy a strategic reserve of DIMM sticks from CXMT.
| But that's not a great strategy either, because RAM tech
| evolves. DDR3 to DDR4 to DDR5 to DDR6. So you need to
| rotate your strategic reserves over time, and luckily
| enough for you, the used goods market is doing exactly that
| for free!
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| There is really nothing about the stock market that means only
| thinking about the mext few quarters. See all the losses on the
| profit and loss statements of AI tech giants, or, say, game
| console companies? Why are their stocks still valued so highly
| during these periods? The answer: investors are thinking long
| term.
|
| It is really impossible to have quality long term thinking
| without capitalization accounting and similar instruments that
| come out of the "wester" system of business that chinese free
| enterprise gladly and speedily copied when it was made free.
| twosdai wrote:
| I think the sentiment here is about management's tie of
| bonuses to near-term stock performance. Maybe not about the
| market itself, I agree with your view on investors want long
| term gains over short term fluctuations mostly.
| nirui wrote:
| > Focusing on profit within the next few quarters, and not
| caring about the longer term consequences
|
| Anything new? From my non-American view, American companies has
| done similar things for a very long time now. It happened in
| the consumer electronics, it might happen again in the IT
| industry.
|
| It's not the fault of the companies, they simply just wanted
| more certainty and the consumer market is not (when compare to
| cooperate contracts).
|
| But from the stand point of a nation, if no one creates low-end
| products, then no one will be providing low-end/entry-level
| jobs. That's when you got structural problems.
| someperson wrote:
| As a outside observer, NAND and DRAM prices have skyrocket ed
| with the AI infrastructure boom just as the China-based fabs are
| coming online.
|
| It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very
| aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out
| other players forever, especially in DRAM.
|
| But right now it seems they can max out their supply capacity
| without selling below cost.
|
| Appears to me like China's endless state led (often unproductive)
| investment in semiconductor manufacturing subsidies (for decades)
| is about to pay off with some industry dominance soon.
|
| Like the electric vehicle sector.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| It's funny that you call this an "very aggressive dumping
| strategy" while AI vendors are doing the same but with even
| greater losses and on a much larger scale.
|
| It's all simply a fight for market share.
|
| The original sin is the existing DRAM vendors selling their
| entire (spare) capacity to the likes of OpenAI.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| No one sold their capacity to OpenAI. The vast majority of
| DRAM is transacted in what is essentially a quarterly
| auction.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| "RAM is going to AI: OpenAI has secured up to 40% of the
| market."
|
| https://globalcio.com/news/16062/
|
| You're maybe talking about the spot market, but companies
| are free to make any sort of supply contract.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| AI slop article
| vel0city wrote:
| Ok here's a different analysis:
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-
| star...
| sho wrote:
| Can we please stop with this irritatingly persistent myth? AI
| companies, at least the big ones, do _not_ sell inference at
| a loss - far from it. This has been debunked and explained
| many times and yet it keeps being repeated.
|
| The numbers aren't public but most guesses I've heard are
| that Anthropic's markup is around 50% on average, and that if
| considered in isolation, most models are profitable overall.
| The constant losses are instead due to training the _next_
| models, which will also eventually recoup but later, and
| forward capex investment.
|
| This idea that big AI companies are normally and
| systematically selling inference at a loss as some kind of
| market share strategy is just not supported by the facts.
| rjh29 wrote:
| You talk about myths and then quote vague guesses of 50%
| without sourcing.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| I personally fail to see the downside of any manufacturer
| selling forever at a loss, except for the manufacturer itself.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| You become dependent on the supplier.
|
| The downside in general is that other countries lose
| production capacity in steel, heavy industry, semiconductors,
| machine tools etc - industries that took decades to build and
| can't be easily replaced.
|
| Also they gradually lose the ability to meaningfully innovate
| in those sectors because there's no grounding against
| production reality anymore.
|
| This has geopolitical consequences further down the line.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > steel, heavy industry, semiconductors, machine tools
|
| the question is if single country can carry all these
| industries at loss for prolonged period of time.
|
| Another approach is to rely on international supply chain
| and speed of innovation, we can't produce steel
| domestically profitably today, fine, we may buy it from
| diversified international supplier network, and rebuild it
| fast tomorrow if needed using new tech, and focus on many
| other high margin verticals, instead of putting many
| billions of resources into infra which could be obsolete
| tomorrow.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| This is fine as long as the supply chain is, in fact,
| diversified.
| riku_iki wrote:
| sure, looks like more analysis is needed to check which
| verticals are diversified and which are not, instead of
| throwing blanket list of everything.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Agree, worth analysing what is genuinely commodity.
|
| There are more elements to it though which can be sort of
| hard to explain.
|
| There are whole cultures and ways of thinking built
| around production. The children of engineers who worked
| on xyz v1.0 have a genuine advantage when its time to
| work on xyz v2.0. There is a lot of tacit knowledge in
| these engineering fields and you have a huge advantage in
| knowledge retention if you can maintain unbroken chains
| of succession.
|
| You can't achieve the top levels of ability (decades of
| experience, generational knowledge) if you are whip-
| sawing production to and fro across the globe every 10
| years.
|
| There are also cross pollination effects. Being _in the
| same community_ with as many related fields as possible
| (co-located) is what drives cross-pollination and
| mobility of ideas and people between industries.
|
| Think how many countries have tried to copy "silicon
| valley" and failed, and _why_ they failed.
|
| What I'm saying is that technology is built by _people_
| and there are human reasons why having local capacity is
| beneficial for all the related industries in the area.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > The children of engineers who worked on xyz v1.0 have a
| genuine advantage when its time to work on xyz v2.0.
|
| my point is that other children with no extremely heavy
| investments into perl v1.0, will have some skills in c++
| v1.0 and python v1.0, and will have advantage in adapting
| Tensorflow v1.0, which is more valuable than skills in
| perl v2.0. Heavily investing in one industry you
| sacrifice some flexibility.
|
| So, this is multifactor analysis, lets say wise American
| people will elect me as next president, I would create
| list of industries, assign metrics (national security
| importance, potential revenue in 5y from now, impact on
| other industries, potential margin, risks of failure,
| etc), then build some formula which aggregate those
| metrics into single, and base on final metric allocate
| weighted funds to support N top industries.
| esafak wrote:
| https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The downside in general is that other countries lose
| production capacity in steel, heavy industry,
| semiconductors, machine tools etc - industries that took
| decades to build and can't be easily replaced.
|
| That's not really what happens though. You don't actually
| "lose" capacity, you just move to higher-valued special
| niches within the overall industry because (1) you can
| afford to, while low-cost competitors can't and (2) you can
| no longer expect to be the lowest-cost supplier for the
| bulk of the market. That's a win-win development and
| something to be encouraged.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > You don't actually "lose" capacity, you just move to
| higher-valued special niches within the overall industry
|
| That's not what people mean by "lose" capacity.
|
| Suppose DRAM companies expand capacity because prices are
| high, then demand levels off, the price crashes, and they
| all go out of business except for the one in China which
| gets a government bailout. That's fine, right? We're not
| interested in making DRAM, that's a fungible commodity,
| we want to make iPhones or something. (They make those
| too anymore, but never mind that.)
|
| What happens now if China restricts what you can buy to
| give an advantage to their own companies who are trying
| to displace you in the higher-valued special niches? Or
| just raises the price for you and not them? What if
| there's a trade war? Or a conventional war?
|
| When you still have a domestic industry, you go to them
| and have a source for the commodity. If only one country
| becomes the sole global supplier and that country isn't
| even particularly friendly, that's _bad_.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The domestic industry is still there, only instead of
| mass-market DRAM it has started making higher-valued
| varieties of the same stuff. If there's a trade war, they
| _can_ easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff,
| just at much higher cost. You can 't expect more than
| that, since they never really were as big or as low-cost
| as the lowest cost suppliers can be in normal times.
| That's not "losing" capacity, it's just acknowledging
| that you can't create capacity out of thin air.
| kyralis wrote:
| > If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to
| making the mass-market stuff, just at much higher cost.
|
| "easily" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
| Depending on the good and what they switch to making,
| this may neither be easy nor quick.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| No, the domestic industry stagnates (at best) or
| disappears (at worst).
|
| You can't just spin up a 2nm wafer fab when the latest
| you've been running is a 300nm process.
|
| Compare: US shipbuilding industry to China or SK.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| We don't _want_ to spin up wafer fabs because,
| historically, they had a tendency to turn into Superfund
| sites. That 's why the more modern approach is to build
| the fab in the middle of a frickin' desert.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Historically, but likely not anymore. You wouldn't be
| allowed to casually poison the ground in a Western
| factory anymore and we have the technology to keep the
| environment mostly clean. I don't even see it being very
| expensive compared to other fab costs. Have a sealed
| floor and proper waste / exhaust processing, don't spill
| in the first place. Things must be extremely well
| controlled anyway.
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to
| making the mass-market stuff
|
| Factories, tooling, supply chains, and engineering
| knowledge aren't fungible in the way they would need to
| be for your statement to be true.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Different types of DRAM can literally be made from the
| same already-etched wafer. The DRAM bits themselves don't
| change at all. What's different between DDR4, DDR5, and
| HBM is the IO interface to the chip. Changing this does
| not require significant retooling or relearning.
| pdhborges wrote:
| Does that mean CXMT is one inch away from also eating
| into the DDR5 market?
| econ wrote:
| They will eventually eat everything while they laugh at
| us. Why would you build a rail network if it isn't
| profitable? Why build anything if it isn't profitable?
| Why would you even house people if the profit isn't
| guaranteed to be as big as other sectors?
|
| Everyone wanted denarius then escudos then guilders then
| pounds then dollars and soon yuan. They make stuff over
| there, you can buy it with yuan.
|
| I think India might come after that but Africa is sure to
| follow. Give it a few hundred years.
| timschmidt wrote:
| They're still at somewhat of a process disadvantage, but
| they have demonstrated an ability to produce DDR4 on
| older processes than it's typically been produced on. So
| it stands to reason that their process disadvantage will
| not stop them from producing DDR5 at scale. Their DDR5
| will just use a little more silicon, and squeeze the
| jigglyness from a few more electrons, but in this market,
| who cares if RAM cost 15% more to make and was 15% less
| efficient to run, if it's available to purchase at all.
| youarentrightjr wrote:
| > The DRAM bits themselves don't change at all. What's
| different between DDR4, DDR5, and HBM is the IO interface
|
| That's not completely accurate - since the bw between
| these are different, the routing and therefore
| propagation delays for DDR4 won't allow it to magically
| be used as DDR5 or HBM.
|
| If you design for the most strict timings, then sure.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Different types of DRAM can literally be made from the
| same already-etched wafer.
|
| The assumption here is that you would stop making DDR5
| but continue to make DDR4 so that you could start making
| DDR5 again without too much trouble. But the older chips
| have even lower margins than the newer ones. Most of the
| fabs and equipment for making DDR4 were created when it
| was current and then they stay in operation as long as
| there is still enough demand for it.
|
| If you don't make DDR5 and DDR6, what happens to your
| DDR4 fabs when DDR4 is where DDR2 is now? They close
| because nobody wants it anymore. And then you're not
| trying to get to DDR6 from DDR4, you're trying to get to
| DDR6 from an empty desert.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Higher valued varieties, or just higher priced varieties,
| that no one wants to buy?
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| The way I see it, China has leverage once you arreive to
| that dependency situation. That leverages goes away the
| moment they restrict exports and every country scrambles
| to create local production once again.
|
| We are seeing that with some rare earths, even tho china
| is back into exporting them (except to japan, I think?)
| everyone is looking for alternatives already. They may
| have killed their industry 10 years down the line for
| playing with the export lever a bit too much.
|
| Just like how markets punish the ram cartel creating a
| chance for cxmt and ymtc to enter. It would create a
| chance for western companies to do the same if china
| messes with the markets they have "cornered".
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Blame China.
|
| As though moving production to China wasn't something the
| West did intentionally.
|
| And _now_ continues to push manufacturing out of Western
| countries by, for example in the UK and Germany, and
| Australia too, making electricity and gas so expensive it
| becomes cost prohibitive to manufacture much at all.
| vkou wrote:
| You forgot to mention embargoes against it. The US is
| free to sanction firms for their exports to China, but
| then shouldn't be surprised when China builds out
| domestic competitors.
| numpad0 wrote:
| the currency eventually collapses
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I don't know if it's still a thing, but China was getting a
| lot of heat about a decade ago for purposefully devaluing
| their currency to make their exports more attractive.
|
| They kind of had to do this, because their large amount of
| exports were pushing the value of it up compared to others.
| creato wrote:
| If you actually believe this, then what is your explanation
| for a manufacturer to do this?
|
| Do you think they are just stupid?
| fph wrote:
| Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer at a loss, and what
| happened to internet standards?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| First, they're not selling at a loss; the huge price
| increases have allowed them to push aggrssively in the legacy
| markets. They're making "slightly smaller" profits than other
| manufacturers (of which there are now very few).
|
| Second, they can drive out all competition and then have a
| captive audience for whatever prices they want, as the
| barriers to entry in these markets are very high. This is
| essentially what's happened with all higher-end manufacturing
| in the west over the past 30+ years.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Because it's never forever. It's until the corporation
| substitutes the market, at which point you are at their
| mercy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You're always at _someone_ 's mercy in any industry with
| significant barriers to entry, you might as well pick a
| low-cost supplier.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That is such a defeatist position... How about
| regulation?
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Ask the EU how that regulate everything policy is going
| for local manufacturing.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Is the answer to bad regulation to not regulate at all?
| How EU is regulating isn't the only way to do it. And is
| bad regulation that much worse than monopoly by the
| billionaires? There is no distinction. At least with bad
| regulation you always have the chance to vote better next
| time. Good luck dealing with oligarchs.
| PearlRiver wrote:
| Chinese investment has not been unproductive. It gave them
| independence so that the US could not cut them of- see Cuba.
| dygd wrote:
| > It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very
| aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out
| other players forever, especially in DRAM.
|
| Crucial's departure from the consumer market left such a gaping
| hole, that CXMT doesn't even need to push other players out to
| gain a footing.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's more like everyone else abandoned the market, and CXMT
| realised it was free real estate.
| Maxious wrote:
| CXMT was already an option for consumers via brands like
| Kingbank and Asgard.
|
| There's Kingbank DDR5 using CXMT modules starting to become
| available in Australia
| https://www.techpowerup.com/346479/hardware-unboxed-
| examines... including from mainstream retailers like Mwave
| https://www.mwave.com.au/memory/pc-ddr4/kingbank
| https://www.mwave.com.au/memory/pc-ddr5/kingbank
| maxglute wrote:
| How's it dumping below cost when hey can simply sell for 100%
| margins instead of western makers selling for 400%.
| shimman wrote:
| Because only western companies are allowed to make massive
| profits at the expense of entire nations, it's not greed when
| they do it apparently.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Is it not the case that they're raising price in response
| to demand? Ie. if they kept the price low, they'd be
| perpetually out of supply?
| econ wrote:
| Can chose to increase production or embrace the scarcity.
| The later might look delicious on paper. More profit,
| less effort, less short term risk. All you have to do is
| ignore the whale in the room.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| They _are_ increasing production. Fabs take multiple
| years to come online. The modern semiconductor industry
| moves only very slowly and at very great cost.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is no point in increasing production for a memory
| standard that will be phased out next year unless you're
| Chinese.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| No, they raise price because they can and demand isn't
| showing signs of stopping despite increased prices. This
| won't affect whether there's a shortage or not, besides
| we're not talking direct to consumer float product, they
| inked commitments.
|
| If they didn't have a documented history of running
| cartel price fixing schemes for LCD/OLED display tech,
| NAND, and DRAM, I'd maybe agree with you but we have the
| history. They cry every time about China 'dumping' for
| not going along with the racket.
| imtringued wrote:
| They're raising prices in response to the same demand it
| has ever been.
|
| If they kept the price low they could still afford to
| make RAM.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| It's easy to misread, but they're not arguing that. Note the
| "eventually" and "but right now".
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's amazing what can be achieved when you can plan 5 years in
| advance, instead of just making the line go up for the next
| quarter.
| nine_k wrote:
| Not five, but likely twenty-five. Not specific plans but
| attention: situation changes all the time, but the interest
| remains.
| abtinf wrote:
| History is littered with the corpses of those slaughtered by
| the millions in the name of great leader's 5 year plans.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
| ceejayoz wrote:
| And you don't think short term profit chasing has a death
| count?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese
| central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal
| failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to
| effective central authority.
|
| Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently
| passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?
|
| If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they
| caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to
| take a look at what they're doing _today_.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans
| are great, bad five year plans are terrible.
|
| There are sooo many variables in how one could go about
| making and executing five year plans. They must have
| figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
| refulgentis wrote:
| If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some
| chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a
| gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a
| couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 =>
| China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to
| go)
| christophilus wrote:
| I think it's at least valid to conclude that a nation-
| level commitment to taking over a specific industry can
| work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate.
| It's the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level.
|
| If you could figure out how to get your country to
| dominate the world economy without also allowing your
| leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and
| extermination, then maybe you'd have a decent political
| system.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely
| able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way.
| Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is
| not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting
| on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices
| when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable
| solution in the near term.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| The big difference recently from the past is instead of
| philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and
| decisions in China so are willing to course correct
| instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
| impure-aqua wrote:
| I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was
| heavily influenced towards implementing the one child
| policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a
| rocketry background and presented a model whereby the
| population would grow to an unsustainable level unless
| corrective control was applied.
|
| I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested
| to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
| daymanstep wrote:
| UN birth rate projections have also been consistently
| wrong for the past decades.
|
| I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates
| to follow the trend that it has been following for the
| past few decades.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was
| heavily influenced towards implementing the one child
| policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a
| rocketry background and presented a model whereby the
| population would grow to an unsustainable level unless
| corrective control was applied.
|
| The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to
| not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with
| more wealth and especially less child mortality,
| reproduction will drop in about one generation, even
| without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years
| ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children,
| just because the chance was so high that at least two
| would simply die before reaching adulthood.
|
| But thanks due to better maternal healthcare,
| vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped
| significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and
| that's before getting into women being able to control
| fertility on their own or housing/cost of living
| exploding in the same timeframe.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck
|
| One could probably summarize it as having engineering
| leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can
| very efficiently implement very bad social policies.
| Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like
| agricultural planning is also bad.
|
| That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a
| weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
|
| One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is
| instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars
| the state demands, you have more of a competitive local
| government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car
| companies all competing in the local marketplace for
| sales, and eventually some good car companies have
| surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
|
| That's not a completely new model, either - Japan,
| Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through
| remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to
| become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy
| enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine
| civil society that enjoys some basic independence from
| government.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our
| line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated
| their transition into middle class economy / rich world
| standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow
| the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc.
|
| That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties
| would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the
| promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has
| if anything pulled them further away from that path.
| Things like the great firewall have helped him in that
| effort.
| trueismywork wrote:
| One child policy has brought a demographic problem today
| but has solved an existential problem in 70s
| mystraline wrote:
| Notice the go-to for capitalists against communism is
| "Look at how many people they killed!!!"
|
| No such metric is available for capitalist countries.
| Thats because its *always* an individual failure in
| capitalism, not political/societal.
|
| You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work
| a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job
| and health.)
|
| You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for
| baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have
| no real choice here.)
|
| You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to
| interview or hire you.)
|
| You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food
| desert).
|
| Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi
| makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days.
|
| But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a
| "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist
| country.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| "Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism,
| it's just the opposite"
| arcticbull wrote:
| Deaths in the Great Leap Forward were heavily concentrated
| as compared to the Industrial Revolution but the death
| tolls from IR-related famines weren't really all that far
| off. Industrialization was messy everywhere.
|
| The Irish Potato Famine alone killed 15% of Ireland vs the
| GLF killing 5% of China.
|
| That's not a reason not to plan 5 years in advance... is
| it? Any more than the Potato Famine is a reason we should't
| have capitalism.
|
| I can't say that I've ever heard the argument that a plan
| led to a famine therefore we should never make plans, when
| we have great counterexamples that not planning also led to
| famine. Feels like learning the wrong lesson here.
|
| [edit] I also think it's worth pointing out that America's
| response to the Dust Bowl was the Farm Bill, which it could
| be argued is one of the largest-scale examples of central
| planning in history. It continues to this day, and is part
| of the reason Americans pay less as a share of their
| spending on food than any other country on earth.
|
| People say everyone remembers the hits, nobody remembers
| the misses - but that is the opposite of true for
| government. Everyone remembers the misses, nobody thinks
| twice about the hits.
| mystraline wrote:
| The Irish Potato Famine was a constructed starvation by
| England to Ireland. All of their real foodstuffs were
| being stolen by England to run world-level wars
| everywhere, and the Irish grew what they were permitted
| to. Potatoes.
|
| Then the disease hit.
| nxobject wrote:
| OP's point exactly: the Great Leap Forward is the _classic_
| example of society murdering people to make the line go up
| every quarter, no matter the cost or the truth.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| History is littered with corpses. For those willing to see
| them.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Don't forget all the times those plans fail because the world
| did not turn out to be what you thought it would.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| But, we do plan 5 years in advance. Cloud, VR, Crypto, and
| now AI. All glorious five year plans from the Silicon Valley
| Planning Bureau comrade.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very
| aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out
| other players forever, especially in DRAM.
|
| It's not dumping, it's the opposite.
|
| Sam Altman's stunt has created massive amounts of fictitious
| demand (OpenAI isn't using those wafers it's ordering) and
| triggered massive panic-buying from everyone else.
|
| Prices are arteficially high, this has turbocharged China's fab
| and R&D budgets as you observe.
|
| > is about to pay off with some industry dominance soon.
|
| They're not looking to dump the semiconductor markets. They're
| looking to invade Taiwan.
|
| All this buildout in their semiconductor industry is to detach
| themselves from the western semiconductor industry that will
| either sanction them if they invade Taiwan, or in the case of
| TSMC, suffer major damage in the ensuing conflict.
|
| That the collapse/destruction of the Taiwanese semiconductor
| and electronics industries will utterly ruin the western tech
| industry is somewhere between a happy coincidence and
| acceptable collateral damage to them. No dumping required.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > utterly ruin
|
| I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the
| past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore
| cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer
| electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use
| cutting edge nodes to begin with.
|
| Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on
| the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that
| would hardly be the end of the world. I still use a desktop
| with DDR3 on a daily basis (granted the GPU is much newer
| with GDDR6) and my laptop is from the early era of DDR4 ...
| smw wrote:
| > but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs,
| right?
|
| No they don't. Even the US partnerships with TSMC aren't
| cutting edge.
|
| TSMC and arguably Samsung have cutting edge fabs, no one
| else.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Why would they bother to invade Taiwan when they're winning
| economically and diplomatically?
|
| Public opinion in Taiwan is rapidly changing towards peaceful
| re-unification and no one anywhere on earth trust the US will
| help them with anything.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| China economic numbers don't have a winning tune to the in
| the least. I don't think taiwan could ever be taken by
| force, but that doesn't matter as Xi Jinping seems to think
| it's doable and is taking steps towards it (developing
| landing ships, purging the military of oppsition and
| pacifists, building a fleet and bombers...)
|
| It would be very surprising to me that taiwan people think
| a reunification is feasable while the CCP still exists,
| just see how things are going in HK to see what would be
| waiting taiwan if they reunite.
| abtinf wrote:
| > It is wise ... to price well below cost push out other
| players forever
|
| I challenge you to name a single successful example of this
| that isn't state enforced.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Amazon?
| abtinf wrote:
| Amazon was wildly profitable on a unit cost basis from
| relatively early on. They didn't show profits on paper
| because they reinvested everything into their capital
| buildout to reduce costs even more.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I thought Amazon was selling quite a few items at a loss
| to undercut competition early on?
| ayewo wrote:
| They did in some instances, not all.
|
| A notable example where they ate $ millions in losses is
| the Diapers.com story [1] [2].
|
| [1]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-
| how-jeff-be...
|
| [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-
| detail-am...
| api wrote:
| All VC funded companies that release free or underpriced
| products and services, capture market share, then raise
| prices or enshittify?
|
| The entire business model of VC funded tech?
| abtinf wrote:
| Typically, VC funded firms are inventing new markets
| entirely.
|
| Simply overcoming startup capital costs is not the argument
| being made when folks claim dumping.
| api wrote:
| They are? Most of what VC funded companies do has been
| done before at a smaller scale, often with less polish
| and at a higher price.
|
| VC money is used to scale up, cut costs with scale,
| capture markets, and then usually prices go up later
| depending on the economics.
|
| The Chinese state is basically just acting as a big VC
| fund for Chinese manufacturing industries. A VC fund with
| a sovereign currency and the ability to sustain burn-mode
| for decades.
|
| It doesn't always work. There are some absurd examples of
| Chinese waste produced this way like "ghost cities." But
| when it works it works, and at tremendous scale, and they
| can just dominate entire industries.
| XorNot wrote:
| It's questionable whether the ghost cities truly exist
| though. I was under the impression they were a product of
| China's bizarre savings and investment market, and that a
| lot of them have since filled up?
| vkou wrote:
| They were a product of forward-looking planning. Those
| cities were empty when built, but have since all filled
| up.
|
| Meanwhile in the west we don't build anything and then
| are surprised when we run into insane housing shortages.
| neves wrote:
| Uber
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Dumping is when you sell things for below cost. It is not
| dumping when you charge a 500% markup instead of a 1000%
| markup, even if the market is currently selling at that markup.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| I thought the same but when I googled, the results disagreed
| with this point of view.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
|
| All the laws listed there define dumping as something being
| sold below the "normal price" and there being some
| quantifiable harm being done to local industry of the country
| being exported to.
|
| So it has nothing to do necessarily with the cost of
| production, and based on this it could be considered price
| dumping.
| Yohvee7u wrote:
| That's merely the marginalists at the WTO struggling to fit
| their beliefs that value is subjective and unkowable into
| the reality of commodity production.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Okay, so what official sources do you base your
| definition of price dumping on? Nobody is asking for your
| opinion on what you think price dumping is. This is a
| legally recognised thing, not just some random talking
| point.
| yogthos wrote:
| I find people tend to miss the productive aspects of Chinese
| state led investments because they don't consider their value
| at scale. Take the HSR system, it has been derided time and
| again as being wasteful, and too expensive, and so on. Yet, now
| it's become a key artery for trade and commerce across China.
| It allows goods to move at an incredible speed, boosts tourism,
| and helps overall development of many regions which otherwise
| wouldn't see much economic activity.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Is China doing to DRAM what Amazon did to bookstores?
| swed420 wrote:
| Awesome. Hopefully storage is next.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| This is good news. The price you pay for jacking up your prices
| is losing market share.
|
| Once established, the Chinese vendors will retain most the market
| share if the quality is ok. The SK/JP vendors are making a big
| mistake.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Everyone is completely sold out and adding capacity as quickly
| as possible.
| ErneX wrote:
| Are they really adding capacity?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I am sure you can lock great prices for ram for 2035
| delivery.
| cmxch wrote:
| If only on principle alone, could one secure a contract
| to buy a few TB of DDR5 memory to be delivered in 2035?
|
| And if so, how?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Few TB probably not, but few EB I think you will be able
| to make a contract.
| cmxch wrote:
| Oh well. Just wanted to do a commitment buy to at least
| say "I don't care if my RDIMMs are long obsolete" for
| some existing DDR5 builds I have.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Yes of course. Looking at the share prices of their
| suppliers-- ASML, Lam Research, Applied Materials, etc.
| kvemkon wrote:
| But since when? There are public announcements about new
| energy deals since summer 2024. But I'm missing any
| information about similar RAM/NAND/HDD deals back then,
| so that corresponding shortages could be only for short
| time until, say, summer 2026.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| It's not clear that raising your prices to match the
| supply/demand curve is a mistake
|
| They will compete on price if they are forced to, but they
| aren't forced to right now
| yellowapple wrote:
| It ain't the price raise that's the mistake (even if that's
| what's currently painful for those of us looking to buy RAM).
| It's the willingness to _only_ raise prices, and not
| meaningfully expand production, that 's the mistake.
| Snoozus wrote:
| Would you build a fab that costs billions and takes years
| to start production because of a bubble?
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| This decade is going to end with Chinese dominance in everything.
| Trump and AI handed them everything they need on a platter.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Western European countries got dominant, then got arrogant,
| letting the USA eat their lunch.
|
| USA got dominant, got arrogant, letting China eat their lunch.
|
| China is indeed getting dominant. They will get arrogant one
| day. Meanwhile, Western Europe and the USA are still very good
| places to live.
| yellowapple wrote:
| The pertinent question, then, is who's gonna eat China's
| lunch?
|
| My guess would be south/southeast Asia (India and Vietnam
| seem especially promising), but if the US was smart it'd put
| its efforts fully toward as many infrastructure investments
| and trade agreements and immigration agreements as possible
| to create a pan-American economic union. We have the
| resources and technology to turn every country in North and
| South America into an industrial and technological
| powerhouse. We have the resources and technology to finally
| conquer the Darien Gap and connect North and South America
| with highways and high-speed rail. We have the resources and
| technology to go on the offense against drug cartels (while
| also eliminating the failed border controls and drug
| prohibitions that keep those cartels in business in the first
| place).
|
| If we're gonna be imperialists, then by golly let's at least
| be productive about it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| China's big. It has a long way to go before all of it
| becomes developed enough that they have to worry about
| someone else eating their lunch.
|
| And Latin American nations can't get started on economic
| development because their governance sucks. It's actually a
| decades-old problem, and not one that the U.S. can do much
| about. The one country that probably has the best shot
| right now is Argentina, let's see how they do.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > not one that the U.S. can do much about
|
| Are you forgetting all those times the US sabotaged
| various south american governments?
| est wrote:
| > China is indeed getting dominant. They will get arrogant
| one day
|
| China was dominant. They got arrogant before 1840, then
| there's 100 years of humiliation.
| Snoozus wrote:
| Exactly, there are no losers here, everyone gets lunch.
| Magnets wrote:
| This is just marketing. Why would you sell at 50% of market rate?
| Chinese production of NAND and DRAM is not significant, it's
| single digit %
| amluto wrote:
| It might be very effective marketing. The big non-Chinese OEMs
| trust and use Korean and Japanese DRAM, and they might have
| been unwilling to put DRAM from CXMT into their products. (CXMT
| is newish, does not have access to ASML gear, which ASML would
| like you to believe makes it harder to make high-quality DRAM,
| DRAM is historically not a very large fraction of the cost of
| most non-huge-memory machines, and a bad DIMM is an expensive
| mistake for a company like Dell or HPE that is on the hook for
| repairs.)
|
| But now CXMT seems to have gotten at least Dell, HP (I wonder
| if the article meant HPE), Acer and Asus to buy and attempt to
| qualify samples. If CXMT lands some serious purchasing
| agreements while still selling well above cost, that's a win
| for them.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Does the last part of your comment explain it? They need
| revenue to expand capacity and the market has opened up a
| window to become a bigger supplier while still being
| profitable.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| > Why would you sell at 50% of market rate?
|
| Because market rate is a 400%+ markup right now and not
| everyone is a greedy American kleptocrat with a diagnosable
| addiction to extracting every possible cent of wealth on the
| planet within a single fiscal quarter.
| simoncion wrote:
| Yeah. Seriously.
|
| I can see a few other benefits to the "Sell at a reasonable
| markup, rather than 'market price'" strategy.
|
| * You get a reputation for _not_ price-gouging.
|
| * Your company gets used to operating with "enough" cash,
| rather than having "crazy" amounts of cash that it might be
| tempted to spend on misadventures.
|
| * When the collapse of LLM Mania burns the LLM industry and
| its hangers-on to the ground, you get to keep your prices the
| same and keep your business practices the same... rather than
| scrambling to figure out how to make do with _far_ less cash.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| DDR4 going from $1.35 to $11.50 in a year shows this market was
| already distorted before CXMT showed up.
|
| Legacy DRAM is still over half of Samsung and SK hynix's
| production capacity. That's where the volume pain actually lands
| while they're betting everything on HBM4.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| A near 10 times price rise of legacy chips and surely a lot
| higher profit increase couldn't motivate SKamsunix to increase
| their capacity for that segment, even more, they proudly
| informed the market about their decision to stop making DDR4 at
| the end of this year... to focus on even higher margin
| products.
|
| But they aren't going to stop whining about China, no matter
| how much pain the market experiences.
| Havoc wrote:
| Great moment to break into the market if you're willing to
| forfeit profits
| fulafel wrote:
| Has DDR5 caught up to DDR4 latency yet? I remember it was worse
| at least in the beginning. There's more bandwidth per channel but
| a hw design can always add more channels for the desired BW. Not
| so for latency.
| kvemkon wrote:
| > add more channels
|
| and unfortunately increase latency even more with registered
| DIMMs. Comparing bandwidth increase (50 GB/s) to the stagnated
| latency (~80..120 ns total, less than ~0.1 GB/s) over last
| decades, I'm wondering, whether one still can call today's RAM
| _random_ memory (though sure it can be accessed randomly).
| Similar to hard disk drives. Up to 300 MB /s sequentially but
| only up to less than 1 MB/s 4KB random (read).
| fhars wrote:
| People have been wondering that for a while:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304281
| maxglute wrote:
| Still no confirmation if CXMT or YMTC actually removed from
| entity list, until then this is jus cheap domestic inputs.
| wcoenen wrote:
| As far as I understand, the "entity list" you are referring to
| is part of the "Export Administration Regulations", so it
| restricts sales from the US to restricted entities, not the
| other way around.
| alecco wrote:
| Good news. Now we need Chinese manufacturers of DDR4 chipsets and
| motherboards.
| wmf wrote:
| Chipsets don't determine the RAM type and all motherboards have
| been made in China for a while.
| alecco wrote:
| Taiwan dominates the global motherboard industry. (ASUS,
| Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, etc. and MediaTek etc)
|
| The big Taiwanese manufacturers are chasing the AI dragon.
|
| https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251021PD219/ai-server-
| asro... (Oct 2025)
|
| OTOH, now I read small Taiwanese manufacturers who are left
| out of the Nvidia supply chain are reverting to DDR4
| motherboards because of the DDR5 shortage. Strange times.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Good news. Now we need Chinese manufacturers of DDR4 chipsets
| and motherboards.
|
| Search aliexpress for X99 dual socket motherboards.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Is there a reason GPU's don't use insane "blocks" of sdcard slots
| (for massively parallel io) so the model weights don't need to
| pass through a limited PCI bus?
| Neywiny wrote:
| Yes. Let's do the math. The fastest sd cards can read at around
| 300 MB/s (https://havecamerawilltravel.com/fastest-sd-cards/).
| Modern GPUs use 16 lanes of PCIe gen 5, which is 16x32Gb/s =
| 512Gb/s = 64 GB/s. Meaning you'd need over 200 of the fastest
| SD cards. So what you're asking is: is there a reason GPUs
| don't use 200 SD cards? And I can't think of any way that would
| work
| hedgehog wrote:
| SD is obviously the wrong interface for this but "High
| Bandwidth Flash" (stacked flash akin to HBM) is in
| development for exactly this kind of problem. AMD actually
| made a GPU with onboard flash maybe a decade ago but I think
| it was a bit early. Today I would love to have a pool of
| 50GB/s storage attached to the GPU.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| First gen HBF is targeting something like 1.2 TB/s!
| hedgehog wrote:
| Oh definitely. The AMD past product just stuck 4x m.2
| slots onto the board. Today that approach would be 50-60
| GB/s read speed which would be useful enough for
| something that any of the vendors could build with
| existing components.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Some years ago I realized that if I had oodles of money to
| spend I would totally get someone to make a PCIe card with
| like several hundreds microSD cards on it.
|
| You can buy vertical microSD connectors, so you can stack
| quite a lot of them on a PCIe card. Then a beefy FPGA to
| present it as a NVMe device to the host.
|
| Goal total capacity, as you can put 1TB cards in there. And
| for teh lulz of course.
| 15155 wrote:
| This isn't a very difficult thing to build, but I am
| curious - what's the point? Who is the market?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The main point would be teh lulz as mentioned, and the
| market would be me. You know, just because it's possible.
|
| Physically easy to build, main challenge for me would be
| FPGA implementation.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| One thing to note, those aren't the fastest SD cards, those
| are the fastest UHS-II SD cards. The future is SD Express and
| you can already get microSDs at 900 MB/s.
| Neywiny wrote:
| SD expires cards are still on my watch list after seeing
| this https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22665216/sd-express-
| card-s.... But even then, that's only 3x faster, so you're
| still putting down 71 ish (I think my original number was
| 213.33) cards, which means 71 PCIe PHYs and NVMe stacks.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Maybe latency. IIRC flash is a lot laggier than DRAMs and
| SRAMs.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| The random access memory models is not really representative
| of ML workloads (both training and inference), where
| multiplying large tensors result in predictable memory access
| patterns.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The next gen inference chips will use High Bandwidth Flash
| (HBF) to store model weights.
|
| These are made similarly to HBM but are lower power and much
| higher capacity. They can also be used for caching to reduce
| costs when processing long chat sessions.
| decryption wrote:
| That explains the cheap DDR4 DIMMs on AliExpress. Can get 2x 16GB
| DDR4-3200 DIMMs for A$252 delivered to Australia. A local PC
| store has same spec "name brand" RAM for around $380-$400.
|
| https://a.aliexpress.com/_mssanU1
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| These prices are insane. I can't believe that's what
| constitutes a good deal right now.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| For context, I spent $105 USD (all in) for 2x16gb DDR5 ram
| last April
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| 2x48GB DDR5 for $285 last March.
|
| Turns out I got the wrong kit for that build and had to buy
| another. It was too late to return it.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Brutal
| blackoil wrote:
| If you still have that wrong kit, now it's the time to
| sell it to make a fortune.
| walterbell wrote:
| Look at pricing for hard drives, SSDs and even USB flash
| drives.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This. I just had to replace a failing NVME m.2 stick, 2TB,
| that I bought 4 years ago. It was over $100 more than when
| I bought it. It was painful.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I was wondering when people would find out about CXMT. I wish
| them luck and hope the US doesn't sabotage them. We need
| diversity and competition right now.
| 127 wrote:
| The cure for high prices is high prices.
| kristianp wrote:
| Also moving into HBM:
|
| > CXMT is in the process of converting wafer capacity equivalent
| to about 20 percent of its total DRAM output -- some 60,000
| wafers per month -- at its Shanghai plant to the fourth-
| generation HBM3 chip production
| yellowapple wrote:
| > the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at
| $11.50
|
| If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find
| online multiple times that much?
| alex43578 wrote:
| Brent crude is $71 a barrel, but you can't buy gas for $1.69.
| Why's that?
| dizhn wrote:
| Are you able to buy crude by the gallon and refine it
| yourself? That would bring the cost down a bit.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| You can buy oil on the market and take delivery, yes.
| Figuring out the logistics (tanker trucks, rail cars,
| storage tanks etc) will also be your problem though.
|
| Commodities markets aren't like eBay, nobody is just going
| to FedEx you a barrel of oil.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > nobody is just going to FedEx you a barrel of oil.
|
| I'm sure someone will if you pay enough. But you
| certainly won't be getting the market standard bulk
| price.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Because that's just the price for the dies, still need
| packaging, integration and then retail distribution. Also raw
| BOM is like 1/5th of the retail price usually.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Raw BOM is much higher than 1/5th of retail price for ram.
| Some industries have higher margins than others.
|
| 11.5*8 = 92. I'm seeing plenty of DDR4 sticks below that
| price.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The 11.5 isn't the raw bom for the sticks that's the cost
| of the dies.
| namibj wrote:
| That's a small b, that's gigabit. And that matches e.g. a
| "crucial pro udimm 64GB kit ddr4-3200 cl22-22-22 2Rx8" being at
| about 100$ a year ago.
|
| Currently they sell here in Germany for 409EUR each, that's
| 6.25EUR for half of each of the 16Gbit chips on that kit.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > That's a small b, that's gigabit.
|
| That explains it, thanks!
| yanhangyhy wrote:
| Whenever China is mentioned, it's always about government
| subsidies, as if Samsung didn't receive government subsidies when
| it was developing
| throwaway290 wrote:
| remind me is Samsung's source subsidies also regularly
| attacking every country's telecoms and infrastructure
| 361994752 wrote:
| is CXMT attacking every contry?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| its owner and boss
|
| but sure if they are ordered to they will, good point too;)
| vkou wrote:
| How many countries has China bombed in, say, the last
| year, and how does that compare to the other superpower
| (and the washed out has-been superpower) in the room?
|
| It's difficult to comprehend the gall and hypocrisy
| requires to kvetch about this when there are four carrier
| strike groups sitting in the Gulf _right now_.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| what are you talking about? since when Samsung suddenly
| become American? how many did South Korea bomb?
| yehat wrote:
| dude, you're way too excited. I understand your
| sentiment, but it applies for everyone these days. Just
| depends which propaganda you like more.
| bhouston wrote:
| I've heard that Samsung's business practices can be quite
| predatory. Basically if you have cool tech and you try to
| sell it to Samsung, you'll often get a few meetings and then
| they will go silent and then what you were trying to sell
| them will be offered by them as a new product about a year
| later. At least this was the situation like a decade ago.
|
| I think this is because they are a huge conglomerate and
| there are divisions and groups that specialize in everything
| and their (Samsung) culture is to do everything as much as
| possible in house.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > you'll often get a few meetings and then they will go
| silent and then what you were trying to sell them will be
| offered by them as a new product about a year later
|
| This is how business works anywhere. there are no
| charities. whatever you say to investors or suppliers they
| can use so you better be careful have lawyers and set up
| correctly.
|
| (The caveat is of course when Chinese companies do this
| your lawyers can do nothing while in a developed country
| you can have some recourse)
|
| But even if Samsung was super predatory business wise it is
| beside the point. if they both get subsidies and de facto
| are close to their governments then you have to look at
| what their governments do. If you like what CCP is doing,
| it's your choice
| erxam wrote:
| You mean the US? Yeah, they are.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| sorry forgot Samsung is a US company
| dakolli wrote:
| Samsung IS the government.
| walterbell wrote:
| https://wccftech.com/apple-eyeing-a-partnership-with-chinese...
| Apple has planned to explore cooperation with Chinese memory chip
| manufacturers Yangtze Storage (YMTC) and Changxin Storage (CXMT)
| to strive for more favorable supply contracts [from the big
| three]
| hedora wrote:
| Back in the 1990's everyone had to have a unix workstation for
| unclear reasons (why not run Linux for < 10% the cost?).
|
| There were crazy bubble economics schemes that meant doomed
| startups got unix boxes for free.
|
| When the bubble popped, the workstation vendors hit a triple
| whammy: Inferior $/perf, unlimited used inventory at low prices,
| and an economic downturn.
|
| The same exact thing is happening now, except the hardware is
| being jammed into data center models.
|
| Anyway, when the bubble pops, people making affordable consumer
| stuff will be fine (like this CXMT company).
|
| People that went all-in on firing all non-hyperscaler customers
| (like micron/crucial) will find they're building the wrong chips
| for end-user devices, there is no server market anymore (for a
| few years), and they have a total addressable market of maybe
| 1000 distressed companies, globally.
|
| I predict the people making these decisions and destroying their
| companies to juice Q2 2026 financial _outlook_ numbers will
| genuinely be surprised when the bankruptcies start.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| They wont be allowed to go bankrupt.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Everyone here wants to be able to buy RAM at a reasonable price
| again.
|
| After reading articles about CXMT and repeatedly reviewing the
| comments here - my take is there's nothing in play that will lead
| to reasonably priced RAM anytime soon.
|
| If I'm wrong please illuminate us. We could use some hope.
| walterbell wrote:
| Can Apple, Dell and HP lobbyists convince US regulators to lift
| restrictions on working with Chinese memory manufacturers, at
| least until Micron's new semiconductor fabs can ship US-made
| DRAM and SSDs to US OEMs in 2028? https://wccftech.com/cxmt-
| ymtc-removed-from-pentagon-list-op... The
| Pentagon has withdrawn the document that suggested updates to
| Section 1260H
|
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/micron-is-spending-200-billion-to-b...
| | https://archive.is/XKSpC Each fab will be
| 600,000 square feet--the size of more than 10 football fields--
| making them some of the biggest "clean rooms" ever built in
| America. To prepare the site, engineers have already blasted
| through more than 7 million pounds of dynamite. An army of
| construction workers, building contractors and architects have
| set up a small city's worth of trailers so they can work around
| the clock.
| trash_cat wrote:
| Geopolitics and industrial policty aside, I think it's important
| to check how stable and reliable these chips are. I wouldn't
| count on them being on par with "western" ones. Correct me if I
| am wrong here.
| ErneX wrote:
| Even Apple is looking into them as providers. And imagine what
| the money Apple can provide in advance can do for their
| manufacturing needs if they are serious about securing memory
| supply for their product lines.
| globemaster99 wrote:
| Most of the westerners and Americans got no idea about What they
| are talking.
|
| Chinese economy is a carefully engineered financial and
| industrial capitalism, that focuses on what real people need in
| the real world.
|
| American oligarchy really focus on financial engineering with
| profits on stock prices and quarterly profits.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Flashbacks incoming
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-mn-698-st...
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