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cheschireyesterday at 1:13 PM1 replyview on HN

Those micron factories won’t even be targeted at consumer-grade RAM though, right?


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DiabloD3yesterday at 1:55 PM

There is no such thing as "consumer grade RAM". Servers still take DIMMs, ECC DIMMs just has more chips on it (previously 9 instead of 8, but now 10 instead of 8 as of DDR5; you'll see some DDR5 DIMMs with 5 instead of 4 because they're double die packages).

Micron, Samsung, and Hynix just basically sell you chips that comply with the JEDEC spec, and the DIMM manufacturers further bin them according to purpose. The highest end chips (that are stable at high clocks and acceptable voltages) end up in enthusiast performance products, the ones that don't work well at all but still meet JEDEC spec are sold to Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc for Grandma's Facebook machine, and the ones that are exceptionally stable at thermal design limits are plunked onto ECC DIMMs and sold to servers.

Also, as others have mentioned, its just a fab, and it can make any of the dies they're able to make. Whatever needs to be made to meet demand, they make, they just can't turn on a dime and react to quarterly concerns, and are locked into cycles that may range from 6 months to 18 months.

Side note that is also worth mentioning, sometimes you can order special bins of parts with features that wouldn't normally be available if you're willing to order enough. Recent example being Nvidia buying overclocked GDDR6 chips from Micron with additional features enabled; Micron was more than happy to become Nvidia's exclusive supplier for the custom GDDR chip if Nvidia was willing to buy out the entire run. Stuff like this happens every so often, but isn't the norm.

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