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brennanpetersontoday at 12:24 AM1 replyview on HN

Well, you are working from all sorts of misguided assumptions about how you convert, the yield, the efficiency, the shared capital, and history.

Old gen logic barely exists, and won't convert. The tools are wrong so it wouldn't yield. And there isnt the expertise (on tool recipes and integration) to do it.

Historically, memory is a sawtooth business. But history isn't a great guide here: 10 years ago, a new plant added meaningful capacity, as it came with a shrink of about 30%. Today....it doesn't. So it take huge capital to add a very small amount of capacity.

You can dream that things like 3d dram and 4f cells will help, but they are unlikely to offer enough with demand.

And finally, everyone running a dram plant has lived through these capacity boom bust cycles and the consequently layoffs and pay cuts. I suspect they are happy to take money this time. I would be in their place.

I do hope we see a new dram or dram-like designs. And that there are more efficient dedicated ai processors. And that models themselves become more memory efficient. But I don't really believe any of these come soon.


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ggmtoday at 12:58 AM

I think a lot of what you say is true, but we're facing shortages for DDR3/DDR4 RAM and this isn't about increasing density or speed, it's about the pricing of what is a high yield functional commodity in todays manufacturing.

So the questions about 3D and 4D ram, they just aren't applicable.

Somebody should be making Samsung/Hynix ram chips and assembling them onto carriers 24/7 to sell to ordinary people. Instead, the entire production capacity is selling to Hyperscalers and going to AI.

(I could of course be wrong about even this)

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