A particularly surprising discovery is that CXMT is constructing its cleanrooms—where the actual silicon is produced—in just around 12 months, whereas the rest of the DRAM manufacturing industry typically takes 21-24 months, nearly a full year longer.
Finally, the report notes that the Chinese government is encouraging CXMT to transfer its DRAM technology IP to other Chinese DRAM manufacturers such as JHICC, Swaysure, and YTMC’s subsidiary XMC. This initiative aims to alleviate memory shortages domestically before CAMT-designed DRAM enters other markets, such as the EU and possibly even the U.S.
I mean… Also assuming this is all real, and the rushed schedule doesn’t produce low quality botched RAM sticks that die in six months.
When it comes to products from China, they can be incredible; unprecedented quality for so much cheaper! Or they can be exactly what everyone says they are and end up in a landfill after a short amount of time.
It’s quite the coin flip.
Honestly cheap ram that has a 50% chance to fail in a year sounds perfect for the llm industry, they already struggle to plan a year in advance, and all their hardware would be obsolete by then anyway, so why the hell not? Plus they could keep the bubble going a few more months by blaming their problems on hardware failures and claiming they’ll sue China or something
But quick delivery would lead a bubble pop…
Just like back in 2008 the investors will try to fake it until they can’t and the entire economy will crash over the whole world.
China making a crap ton of RAM won’t help with that.
This shit is so over. This gang ain’t gonna collude on price with Micron. They’re in for eating Micron. First its market share, then its IP by buying it for pennies on the dollar.
Especially pay attention to the CCP’s directive to share IP among RAM manufacturers. They appear to be looking at this problem as a supply shortage of an essential component for the rest of the economy, which it is. But that also means they aren’t playing for profit.
After watching recent ram cartel investigation from gamernexus: fuck them. They got what they fucking deserve.
A smart decision which the Americans are probably not gonna make would be to nationalize Micron once they become unviable for-profit business, in order to keep the competency and ability to make RAM, which is an essential economic input these days. Instead I think they’ll just let the CXMT gang buy them at that point, just like they’ve let that happen to so many important firms. That’s unless democratic socialism has taken enough control of the US political power.
nationalize Micron
No, no, no, you don’t understand, that doesn’t happen in the US.
What will happen is that they’ll get a trillion dollar bailout, a yuuuuge amount of protectionary tarrifs on overseas competitors and then some other company will scoop them up with no obligations.
And then - and this is very important - maximum profit will be extracted from consumers, who end up being measurably worse off.
ability to make RAM, which is an essential economic input these days
It’s kind of cool to think about…that we’re living in the silicon age. The next step after bronze and iron and steel. We’re still making useful things out of rocks…but different rocks, and now we boil water to use them. Like a stone soup, which itself is based upon a pre-revolution French folk-tale about the joys of communism…but now the government is “encouraging” manufacturers to throw in their vegetables. I don’t think government strong-arming the peoole was a part of the original tale but I could be wrong.
aren’t playing for profit
CXMT is probably the most profitable tech company in China right now.
But the country is not playing for profit of this single company, which would probably be the case in USA (as the company would have lobbying power yo secure that)
I meant the CCP isn’t, not CXMT.
Watch how quickly the US government will try to ban them in the name of security. They’ll claim that they transmit RAM data to the Chinese government 😛.
I hope they do. More for the rest of the world. If Americans want RAM they should start looting data centers.
They don’t use the same kind :(
The US doesn’t manufacture RAM. But becoming reliant on a country so hellbent on dismantling democracy would be unwise.
It’s unclear to me whether you are referencing China or United States, and that makes me sad.
Let’s be honest, that’s referencing America more than China.
China is “hellbent on dismantling democracy”?
Do tell! Which terrorists have the sponsored? Who have they recently invaded? Ooo did they capture the leader of a sovereign state? Does money control all of their politics?
Oh dear, you just summoned the tankies.
This talisman will ward them off:
Micron doesn’t seem interested in competing for consumer memory anyway, since they exited the consumer memory market. Latent demand exists for memory at not-outrageous prices so good for CXMT for filling that niche.
Do you think they’ll stop expanding after filling the consumer memory market though?
I don’t think so, domestic electronics manufacturers have an enormous need for memory that is performant but doesn’t necessarily need the top-of-the-line, and probably China’s government is pushing to reduce the need for imported memory components from Korea or Taiwan as well, so demand for production is there coming from both the private and public sector.
That’s what I’m thinking too. They’re gonna go as far and as wide as they can go.
CXMT will also sell at outrageous prices. It’s free money.
CXMT will sell the chips to memory manufacturers in China for “domestic use only” at near cost price as directed by the CCP.
Those manufacturers will construct consumer ram modules and sell them locally, and there will be grey market exports to other countries for ridiculously low prices compared to everyone else.
This way the CCP props up domestic supply, and chips away at foreign manufacturer market share by turning a blind eye to the massive grey market export of RAM.
Yeah, they are currently engaged in a major spat with Huawei, which is accusing them of price gouging HBM supplies. Sounds familiar…
Micron DDR chips are still being added to many consumer devices. They just would down the side the sold SSDs and similar direct to consumers.
The companies are still focusing on larger customers that are willing to pay more, one has to wonder how they will fare when those businesses aren’t willing to pay as much and the companies they told to take it or leave it have options from China.
“assuming all current projects are completed on schedule”
From the article. This is the single largest fallacy one can engage in in engineering.
“CXMT is projected to produce about 350,000 DRAM wafers per month by the end of 2026, assuming all current projects are completed on schedule.”
This is a small blurb on a random tech site, it’s just giving a simple ‘if all goes well’ projection.
I’m sure they’re not setting the entire undertaking up so that if one thing ends up slightly delayed everyone’s heads will explode. It seems likely that they also have projections that take varying delays with varying parts and numbers of parts of the project into account, but that someone writing a small blurb on a tech site isn’t really privy to the entirety of their forecasting.
I don’t think they need you to rush in and save them from their folly.
Why would you assume any of that? If there is one constant in large-scale engineering projects, it is project managers over-promising on what their teams can deliver. In this case, they are promising a miracle salvation from the global DRAM shortage, so a measure of scepticism is, I believe, warranted.
Everything, everywhere, doesn’t always happen as it does in your frame of reference and experience. I find it unlikely that you’re genuinely an expert in engineering projects of this sort and specifically in exactly how they’re undertaken in China with large scale government support.
I am not an expert in engineering projects in China, which is why I rely on 3rd party reporting to give me an idea of what is going on in that space. And when China makes what seems to me to be a preposterous claim, qualified by “if everything goes according to schedule,” I am suspicious. Not because I particularly distrust Chinese engineers, but because the project managers in my own country are prone to the same tendency to overstate scope, and understate budget and schedule.
Having actually done this, the clean room part is super easy. Getting all the equipment in and running is extremely hard. Finding out all the things you messed up along the way and getting actual yields is extremely hard and also time consuming. So I’d like to know where along that process they are doing the timeline comparison.
Standing by for “Chinese memory is spying on you, don’t buy it”.
If this memory is high quality, it will become very popular with consumers and still have high prices. No reason to lower it a lot for consumer market if they are alone there. Maybe make it 10% cheaper.
Watch international* ram be banned like international* EVs
*Chinese
Ram prices would still fall since other countries would not ban it and would put less stress on the current supply that already exists.
Didn’t this admin already warn Apple?
Most of the consumer dimms are made in Taiwan and Korea. Unless you’re in either of those countries an “international ban” would be a huge problem.
It’s better to use their weak labour standards to exploit their workers for low wages, rather than try to compete with those conditions directly.
Competition is good. Hopefully an end to memory manufacturer price collusion is near. I’m not holding my breath for it though.
It hasn’t felt t like there’s been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last… decade? Definitely not following moores law (if that even applies here). So if youve spent your time price fixing for the western market instead of developing technology to keep you ahead, then second rate competitors will eventually catch up and cut a huge portion of your market share, and enjoy those inflated prices instead of you. This of course is my very uninformed take, and probably completely inaccurate.
It hasn’t felt t like there’s been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last… decade?
In memory? There’s been a ton of improvement, even if most of the coolest stuff isn’t making it into DIMMs that are installed in user laptops/desktops.
Advanced packaging technology has allowed chip manufacturers to put different silicon dies together with increasingly high performance (high bandwidth, low latency) connections in the same package, including with some three dimensional stacking. That way they can mix and match different silicon dies for greater cost effectiveness, yield, performance, etc.
This also means that in-package memory is now the standard in certain chips. Apple’s M-series silicon has its memory packaged right into the CPU/GPU package, as a system-in-a-package, so that the connection between the logic and memory is comparatively much higher performance, several times higher bandwidth than desktops or laptops that don’t follow that kind of architecture.
Similarly, in data centers, the AI boom has caused all the memory manufacturers to switch their production lines to high bandwidth memory, where they vertically stack a bunch of DRAM chips on each other, with ultra-fast, high bandwidth connections, so that they can shove terabytes of memory into these data center servers. These recent generations have been improving speed and bandwidth in ways that make consumer level DDR5 RAM look like child’s play.
So they’re improving things. Just not in ways that really show up in DIMM sticks.
Also DIMM sticks have gotten faster in the last decade.
Like, significantly faster than 2016 RAM.
To be honest DRAM was dirt cheap for quite a while and the profit margins of those companies were razor thin. Only recently they saw a surge in demand and they are exploiting it to enrich themselves but also increasing the manufacturing capacity is a lengthy and costly process which I presume some of those companies are actively trying to delay, in order to preserve their fat profit margins now.
Competition is good though and hopefully will lower the price overall faster.