They will grow exponentially and catch the western market unawares in 10-15 years with a sudden flood of cheap, effective chips. Just like everything else China makes. Electric vehicles for example.
They will grow exponentially and catch the western market unawares in 10-15 years with a sudden flood of cheap, effective chips. Just like everything else China makes. Electric vehicles for example.
Sure, if they've got production grade EUV, but right now they don't even have production grade DUV.
I'm also sure they can go as far as 5nm like SMIC if they really wanted to, since it's strategic for China, but the cost would only be justified if the current cycle lasts long enough.
I was corrected elsewhere when I thought RAM was more expensive 10 years ago. RAM was actually cheaper 10 years ago, when it was DDR3/DDR4 too. If any company can replicate the 10 year old SOTA, they can bring prices down.
This is what I expect to happen. 2016's ram was good enough for consumers then and probably still is for a huge class of consumers now. I'd rather 32GB of DDR3 than 8gb of DDR5.
DRAM rarely break, yes, I have bought cottage industry recycled DDR3 with no problem whatsoever.
The problem, however, is IO controller support has been dropped, many new CPUs don't even support DDR4 any more, especially mobile ones.
The market seems to stay strange because few believe it can stay strange, but looking back at the netbook industry I feel like a few losers at keeping up for the AI level will realize they may as well make the products that people prefer old prices for and start resuming anything that can bring total system costs down.
You can get like terabytes of DDR3 used. No one wants that shit. Too slow. Power hog.
This is where China's crazy solar advantage affects real day to day outcomes. When you have electric costs going into 6-8 cents per kwh then you can run older nodes that slurp more electricity. They aren't even done lowering the price. I've thought about this recently. If the dream of meterless electricity came to fruition then that terabytes of DDR3 could essentially be run until it literally burned out and then recycled back into its core components. The sun provides more power than the entirety of society could possibly currently use and so its a shame that the ram is being tossed instead of used.
Well yes, but it isn't too cheap for how 8ld it is.
Some dude literally gave away a couple of terabytes on Reddit homelab subreddit the other day.
Just before the ASML ban, China imported as many DUV machines as possible.
Continue to dismiss China at your own peril.
China has a luxury of being able to not really care about the cost when it comes to what they view as a strategic advantage.
This option is available to any sovereign country.
In fact, it is what most European countries used to do for their strategic industries.
America does it too for its strategic financial business, bailing out the banks after 2008.
The problem is that the chances of the bursting of AI bubble seem far more likely than this happening first which you say about 10-15 years.
plus, the ram manufacturer cycle moves and does this all the time.
Atrioc does a really good job explaining these cycles[0]
But the point is that AI demand peaked when the supply was at its lowest which is why we are caught up in this messed up timeline that we live in. And this has sort of happen in the past too and this industries notorious for it (again watch the video, definitely worth it imo)
But still it feels like we are in this atleast for a year or two hard. Micron is iirc like suggesting what hundreds of billions of $ in factory investment right now and saying that the fastest might open in early 2027
Some estimates 2028 idk, I do feel like the chances of AI bubble popping around this time are likely too.
But still for atleast 1-2 years, we either as consumers or as small vps providers (yes the people who create vps providers are same people like you and me) are absolutely f*ed and the question is around that imo.
[0] The AI Tax Has Started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nipeaKC3dWs
The thing is, even if the market bursts, prices are already inflated. RAM manufacturers know that everything 5xed and they aren't likely going to rush out and drop the price levels to pre-expansion. Once the AI market bursts, you can expect slow and methodical decreases in price (if any).
And that will ultimately buy China a lot of time to shove their ram into the market cutting ram manufacturers out of most non-US markets.
I think the major memory manufacturers are simply banking on their ability to flood the market if worst comes to worse. That or I could see some standards trickery around DDR6 (or some new BS standard). It'd not shock me if they coordinated with AMD/Intel to keep the standard secret as long as possible simply give themselves a lead in production.
Graphic cards prices normalized quite quickly after crypto boom. Before going nuts for AI training of course.
Those were driven up by scalpers during the crypto stuff. The manufacturers were still selling their cards for a reasonable amount, you just couldn't get one because scalpers and crypto farmers had bot armies gobbling up supplies.
The ram pricing is coming directly from manufacturers.
>Graphic cards prices normalized quite quickly after crypto boom
Eh, I don't think we were on the same planet then. Even post crypto pre-AI GPUs were far more expensive than they were before said crypto. We just got used to paying $1000 for a mid tier cards.