alt Hacker NewsTheir scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate.
They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
They can start making some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.
They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.
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> Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate.
They don't currently have the tech to compete on HBM3 production, but they can produce DDR5 memory, and they will undoubtedly be scaling up production on this.
They're already producing 10nm DRAM with their current nodes, and they're working on producing 3d DRAM which may make node size somewhat moot.
Obsolete process node hardly matters when the rest of the market is bottlenecked on production capacity; small overall scale still might. Expanding capacity may or may not make sense; it depends on your prediction of the way the market will go.
> die size is 40% bigger than Samsung
likely naive question: why it is a problem? I would be fine if RAM in my PC has 10 times larger physical size if it is overall cheaper.
I guess that larger may have more power draw, but given costs of RAM and electricity and power draw of RAM it sounds unlikely to be a problem.
At a high end it would run into real-estate prices - at some point using half of room for computer stops making economical sense, given costs of rent or buying flat space. But just doubling size of PC does not sound like a bad tradeoff if it would be say 20% cheaper. Or 50% cheaper.
Is it about not fitting existing motherboards?
Is there reason why they cannot just make memories physically larger? It is "only" 40%, not 40000%
> They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
Which suits the rest of the world just fine. More for the rest of us, and if the single-digit-percent portion of their market that the US represents wants to lock itself out, no skin off anyone else's nose.
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.