YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

95 points giuliomagnifico 1 hour ago 55 comments

gs17 51 minutes ago | parent

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

nicoburns 43 minutes ago | parent

Why would more RAM supply lead to higher consumer prices?

kenny11 41 minutes ago | parent

If Samsung is limited in the number of wafers they can process per month and they use more of those to produce HBM they necessarily have less of them left to make other products, like consumer DRAM.

deagle50 41 minutes ago | parent

Presumably DRAM production capacity gets reallocated to HBM, not sure.

shevy-java 41 minutes ago | parent

Depends on how quickly they are sold.

zargon 40 minutes ago | parent

Memory allocated for HBM is memory taken away from DDR production.

matja 37 minutes ago | parent

Depends on what proportion of Samsung's output is current HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM.

Everything in their statement can be true and it be a bad thing for consumers of non-HBM RAM.

"HBM capacity to expand to 250,000 wafers a month"

So let's say their current HBM capacity is 100k wafers/month (pure speculation/random number for illustration), and their total RAM capacity (including HBM( is 300k wafers/month, then non-HBM capacity reduces from 200k to 50k.

EgregiousCube 34 minutes ago | parent

Keep in mind that total manufacturing capacity is increasing as well. Perhaps not enough to fully offset, but it's incorrect to assume that supply capacity is flat.

gs17 33 minutes ago | parent

And it's worse than that, Micron said that converting capacity to HBM was at a 3:1 ratio, so that 250k HBM could be up to 750k in non-HBM. Fortunately, some of the increase is due to improved processes.

devy 31 minutes ago | parent

HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM are NOT the DDR4/5 that consumer markets need. Capacity allocation is leaning more to data center grade HBMs so less to produce dedicated DDR4/5 DRAMs. Supply demand will further drive up the consumer DRAM price! Note, the article mentions NO of new fabs is being constructed (all semiconductor manufacturers know that constructing more fabs means the boom/burst cycle will eventually kill them, so no one create more fabs) Perhaps the federal government need to step in here - the market doesn't fit the issue.

tipsytoad 7 minutes ago | parent

Plus it takes 3x the wafer capacity for hbm than the same byte capacity in dram, so we’ll likely see the consumer market be decimated here

sgt 7 minutes ago | parent

Might lower the prices of Mac Minis, Studios etc though

stevefan1999 29 minutes ago | parent

Gamma squeezed by the AI business, that's why. The more you add the fuel, the further it will pump up.

mattstir 6 minutes ago | parent

Part of the implication is that factories that could be producing consumer-facing DRAM like DDR5 would be retooled to produce HBM instead, leading to even less total consumer RAM production.

amelius 51 minutes ago | parent

Will that be enough for AI's hunger?

heaney-555 45 minutes ago | parent

Not even close.

gs17 35 minutes ago | parent

Samsung is already building another fab (which was originally suspended due to low memory prices years ago). Hopefully when it goes live in a few years it's not all dedicated to HBM for AI.

GoToRO 28 minutes ago | parent

It will be just in time for when AI will run very well on consumer hardware and the need for data centers will collapse.

EA-3167 23 minutes ago | parent

Or even more amusing in time for the bubble to burst, I hope the big RAM makers end up holding the whole bag for that. Greedy bastards.

bethekidyouwant 21 minutes ago | parent

Since you’re not greedy when there is a memory glut I’m sure you’ll be willing to pay extra to make it fair.

EA-3167 11 minutes ago | parent

Not at all, I’m going to relax with a cooling drink and watch the consequences of this unbelievably destructive and wasteful venture implode. I also adore the idea that it's on the customer to be "fair" to a company that dumped us a group in favor of chasing B2B money.

Their choice, their consequences.

IshKebab 12 minutes ago | parent

That's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead.

kingleopold 9 minutes ago | parent

This + your ROI in $10k device will be always lower than busy datacenter, its literally math. They sell free compute to others when you dont use it, you will never sell at that level or even you magically sell home compute, you will not compete at price

nutjob2 20 minutes ago | parent

Not until the industry gets severe indigestion, which doesn't seem that far off.

mixedbit 12 minutes ago | parent

During the Covid global chip shortage Intel announced new factories to address the production bottleneck, before the factories even started to be constructed, the shortage was long over and the projects were eventually canceled.

shevy-java 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

pfdietz 38 minutes ago | parent

What abuse? Responding to supply and demand fluctuations isn't abuse, it's the proper operation of the market.

dumberquestions 30 minutes ago | parent

Would if one industry gobbles up an important resource to the point that other consumers lose practical access to it, shouldn't there be limits?

jefftk 27 minutes ago | parent

No. The other industries can bid for access to the resource, and under most circumstances, whether they are willing to bid higher tracks importance. Sometimes there are cases where something has significant positive externalities and so people are not willing to bid high enough, and then we can talk about some kind of government intervention (typically a subsidy that attempts to track the value of the externalities) but I don't see that applying here.

pfdietz 27 minutes ago | parent

If others are willing to pay more, that a signal that more value is created if the resource goes to them rather than to the more price sensitive customers.

applfanboysbgon 14 minutes ago | parent

This logic falls apart completely when gamblers allocate one trillion to bidding up the price, denying access to the resource to people who are responsibly spending their own money. The ideal world of the imaginary perfect free market never takes into consideration the messiness of the real world, like the fact that people will spend extreme sums of money irrationally. It can take years for this effect to correct, damaging the market severely in the meantime.

Alternatively, the money invested can be rational because it prices out competitors and establishes a monopoly, after which point the monopolist earns their absurd investment back with complete control of the market. This is also bad.

joshheitzman 10 minutes ago | parent

Where is the additional supply resulting from the sustained increase in demand?

digdigdag 36 minutes ago | parent

> Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.

Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.

No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.

carlm42 26 minutes ago | parent

Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.

CamperBob2 26 minutes ago | parent

No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.

I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.

bunderbunder 18 minutes ago | parent

I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.

newsclues 20 minutes ago | parent

How much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed?

Can that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest?

psyphy2 40 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised this is getting posted on hn

zahlman 36 minutes ago | parent

Why wouldn't it get posted here?

fooker 29 minutes ago | parent

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

refulgentis 26 minutes ago | parent

In one sense, nothing, in another, everything. It is DRAM, but the bandwidth requirements mean it’s paired to a processor, i.e. no DIMMs. Not 100% sure but things like MacBooks and the Framework tower, where you have fixed RAM for the device lifetime, have ~0 tradeoff.

nutjob2 22 minutes ago | parent

Nothing except CPU manufacturer choices. Mac laptops use it and they're consumer products.

People will have to get used to buying a fixed amount of RAM with their CPU but thats unlikely to be a problem.

chessgecko 20 minutes ago | parent

pretty sure its lpddr not hbm.

addaon 19 minutes ago | parent

> Mac laptops use it and they're consumer products

No, Mac laptops use LPDDR, currently LPDDR5X.

nomorewords 19 minutes ago | parent

The normal non-tech-savvy person already does this. They simply don't know that their ram is upgradeable or something else breaks first, before having to touch ram.

KeplerBoy 17 minutes ago | parent

MacBooks use regular soldered lpddr5(x) RAM. Same RAM as every other laptop manufacturer, they just use more lanes to achieve a higher bandwidth.

bunderbunder 6 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps more noteworthy for general home and business computing, doesn’t it also allow for lower latency?

fooker 16 minutes ago | parent

Apple's "unified memory" marketing is so strong that even tech literate people seem to have this false idea!

They have managed to pull this sort of thing off many many times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

bob1029 19 minutes ago | parent

It's not that there's a blocker. It's that it takes roughly 3x the manufacturing capacity to produce an HBM package at the same storage capacity as DRAM. We are sacrificing total bytes for bandwidth.

tliltocatl 6 minutes ago | parent

How so? FEOL is pretty much the same, BEOL is almost the same save TSVs, the packaging tech is different and more advanced, but not exactly 1:1 comparable. Do TSVs really occupy 3x the area of DDR IO's?

chessgecko 17 minutes ago | parent

I think people might prefer the lower idle power consumption from lpddr over the better bandwidth in hbm in battery powered stuff. That said right now the price is definitely preventing us from finding out.

fooker 14 minutes ago | parent

Idle yes, but HBM energy consumption / memory operations seems to be a bit better than DRAM.

vlovich123 11 minutes ago | parent

Only if you’re running at 100%. Consumers generally do not.

phkahler 14 minutes ago | parent

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

HBM is meant to be integrated into the same package as the CPU, so no more DIMM sockets. It also has higher latency apparently.

reliabilityguy 14 minutes ago | parent

HBM is a stack of DRAMs, so there is no “instead”.