Aren’t Chinese manufacturers already expanding their capacity? Given that Samsung and SK Hynix have left that market in the pursuit of HBM4 chips, China is going to rule this market. At least that’s what analysts are saying.
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In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities.
The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more locked-down design, such as soldered RAM or even SSD. My current ThinkPad already got soldered LPDDR5 RAM chips on it with no user-end RAM upgrade possible, so there's a reason to suspect they'll take more pagers from Apple's book if they can get away doing it, just like what they did when they pushed out those internally mounted unswappable batteries.
My personal guess is that the RAM price will fall down after this period of AI expansion is over and major players starts to consolidate. But it will not fall as much as we're hopping for, because the manufacturers could just reduce production to control the price.
Soldered RAM has objectively lower latency and better signal integrity. Connectors aren't free, in terms of link/SI budget.
This isn't some conspiracy, it's electrical reality.
Problem is, the gain in performance to an user maybe negligible compare to the pain that the device purchased might never be able to be fitted to run some application.
Does that mean we should be designing HBM into consumer devices?
I wouldn't say "should be", but HBM could indeed benefit the end-user somewhat, like @15155 already pointed out. And that benefit could be used as justification for soldered HBMs on future computers.
BUT... a smart consumer would also recognize the other side of the story: do we really need HBM on consumer devices? We don't serve 1000 users at the same time, a slower, cheaper device is good enough for most use cases (including the professional ones), better if it's also somewhat future-proof. After all, smart people usually have better foresight.
Chinese manufacturers like CXMT face the same kinds of issues that Huawei faced in entering the EU market - the EU is clamping down on Chinese suppliers across their supply chain [0].
Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exports?
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
RAM isn't a critical security category like 5G base stations.
Also, I don't think you've seen true consumer rage until the opposition in the EU would start pointing out the current parties are making the smartphones, laptops, TVs and whatnot consumers wanna buy much more expensive (or more crappy). Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to be wavering for young people especially, and tech / gadgets being cheap was one of the sole rays of light left.
Youth unemployment is actually somewhat low in the EU at the moment. It's at around 15%, which is the level as back in 2008 before the great recession.
Raw unemployment numbers are pretty meaningless alone. Governmenments have ways of counting unemployment to get a desired number like for example only counting those registered as seeking work through the government agency. Like If you're doing some school or training, BAM, you're not counted as unemployed, if you've been unemployed for too long, then you're counted as "long term state welfare" and not as unemployed, if you refuse shitty hard labor jobs from the unemployment office, then you're cut off from unemployment and you're not counted as unemployed, and other such tricks.
Plus, even taking a low unemployment numbers at face value, the job quality has fallen a lot, with a lot of people still technically employed but not in great jobs, but in shitty jobs they do for survival, like fast food delivery.
The reality is that mass layoffs and SME bankruptcies are a current occurrence in many EU countries.
> RAM isn't a critical security category like 5G base stations.
Those base stations are only security critical because mobile networks are deliberately insecure to enable government surveillance.
And I can image backdooring RAM. At least the controller part.
> Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to be wavering for young people especially, and tech / gadgets being cheap was one of the sole rays of light left.
Huh?
Then those countries that didn't will have an advantage at selling their electronics to the world.
Or their consumers will enjoy cheap PC part prices. With possible gray zone re-export market.
Of course we could see retreat from global markets to mercantilism, but that has yet to fully happen.
Or China could stop antagonizing blocs like the EU through actions like solidifying ties with Russia [0][1][2], imposing rare earth export restrictions on the EU [3], and undermining EU institutions [4].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/xi-putin-hail-tie...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-president-xi-meet...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-calls-closer-defen...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-steps-up-efforts-cut-...
[4] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
> stop antagonizing blocs like the EU
Who antagonized who first, again?
Ahh, it is always China antagonizing others, isn't it?
There's nothing wrong EU coming to absurd lengths in all directions that are leading to destruction of its economy and society only to please the narrative of few degraded groups of individuals. Yet, it is others that are the cause. Nice, easy story telling.
All governments in the world turned to be on the dark side. But some are reaching new heights.
It's weird how the implication of "every government is bad" is that we should stop trying to improve them or worry about the ones that are the worst.
And Asia is mostly peaceful right now while war has returned to Europe on a scale not seen in 50 years. Those crazy Chinese, eh? Massive failure of their foreign policy establishment. Total inability to engage with Russia.
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
RAM is pretty different to Huawei 5G base stations.
Australia for example is a large and growing market for Chinese electric cars. China is the biggest export market for Australian raw materials so it doesn't just put random trade barriers up.
There's actually a free trade agreement between Australia and China.
So, EU and US tend to actually implement such bans, but the rest of those countries in a list like that..
People appreciated cheap YMTC 232-layers when that happened where I live.
That's a good point.