The article features a truck that the chips get loaded onto. This quote from Tanenbaum immediately jumped into mind:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

I’ve often wondered about die thinning. I mean just looking at sd cards and micro sd etc, it was clear that there had to be a thinning step (or many steps) and it seemed amazing to me that such a complex step could be economically viable. And yet it clearly is. All a matter of being able to operate at scale I guess.

It’s not a step I’ve seen discussed very much, so it was kind of neat to see it discussed front and center in a lay article like this.

On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment.

The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.

The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.

What's the main blocker (other than the current inflated cost) for using HBM instead of DRAM as the primary memory for consumer electronics?

A shame that this should if anything, lead to consumer DRAM prices getting even worse.

Will consumers actually get to purchase it though? Or are they just doubling it for frontier AI labs?

Right now, every company that can is ramping up their RAM production as much as humanly possible. There is such outrageous and growing demand, that it's like printing money if you can manufacture more RAM chips. And that massive financial incentive is driving huge investment in manufacturing capacity.

But someday, that demand will stop rising.

At some point, most people will have enough RAM. And they just won't need to buy more.

The inventories of RAM will become overfull, in warehouses and stores. And suddenly the manufacturers, middlemen, and even retailers will all find the price they can sell at keeps dropping.

But you can't shut down a huge manufacturing facility overnight. You can't shut down a years-in-the-making retail distribution system overnight, either. You can't even shut down a facility that is halfway finished with construction. They'll keep producing and selling RAM at lower and lower profit margins, until the day comes they finally accept they're losing money with each sale.

And when that happens, we'll all have more RAM than we know what to do with. It'll be cheaper than we have all ever experienced in our lifetimes.

I don't expect this to happen soon. But demand cannot keep exponentially rising forever. There will come a point, probably in the next 5 years, when demand at least levels off, even as production capacity is still rising.

And it will be interesting to see what's possible at that point. We'll be able to create software that is not doable right now, because it will no longer be constrained by memory. And even cheap laptops will massive amounts.

tl;dr; This is existing production being redirected to HBM. Which means consumer market is going to get a lot worse.

And the worst thing is that is the best possible strategy for them. It's essentially win-win for everyone but consumers.

- Buyer (AI) has crazy money, so will pay whatever

- Seller doesn't have to build anything new, as the buyer is willing to pay whatever

- Generate ridiculous profits from crazy money

- No oversupply risk in case of reversal

- Return from producing HBM to DDR5 in a single quarter if reversal does happen.

Hold on to your existing hardware, people, and be on lookout for your local deals.

Will that be enough for AI's hunger?

The AI boom is turning into a massive race for HBM capacity.

Good to see Samsung stepping up; maybe GPU prices will finally cool down a bit with more HBM supply hitting the market.

A shortage is almost always followed by a glut. Memory of all kinds is going to get very cheap due to supply and demand and substitution effects.

This insane nonsence needs to stop.

You just know that the AI bubble is going to break and they're going to be stuck with tons of HBM4s.

The big problem is that this will not depress the consumer DRAM market and mean we can all afford DRAM again

Good, maybe this means cloud GPU prices will eventually normalize. Still feeling the pinch from the AI gold rush.

To me, the most idiotic thing is that the world currently cannot build power plants fast enough to even use all the HBM that is being produced. That is, a large portion of HBM and cards are sitting in storage, waiting for the data centers and the power plants to run them. The FOMO in the AI world isn't just in the stock market

This is crazy!

Now make some DDR5.

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The beginning of the bubble pop?

About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over 3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.