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Over the past decade, the memory market has been flooded with cheap chips, causing most players in this market to lose value while breaking even or making a sli
by posguy 10y ago
Over the past decade, the memory market has been flooded with cheap chips, causing most players in this market to lose value while breaking even or making a slim profit on memory sales.
Hopefully, Apple is planning to single source or majority source their memory through Toshiba, and give them funds to develop more advanced memory on newer processes, as that is what this market needs to develop further and faster. Apple may extend their engineering talent into building their own memory controller perhaps, similar to how they have done a ton of in house design for the ARM SoCs used in the iPhone/iPad lineup, instead of using off the shelf ARM designs.
- IBM 10y agoEven if Apple invests in Toshiba's unit there's no way they're going to use them as a single source. They might give them a guaranteed percent of their NAND orders (especially if they get favorable pricing). It would still be in Apple's interest to shop around. Also they already design memory controllers. They purchased the Israeli company Anobit in 2012 to do just that [1]. That's why Apple's storage benchmarks on recent products are really good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anobit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anobit
- posguy 10y agoApple put their storage on a pcie bus, not too surprising it performs so well..
- yeukhon 10y agoI am surprised to hear the negative sentiment on the memory market as for most users who build computers don't always look for the high-end memory. In fact, I am not sure how much performance gain one get from a high-end RAM on a gaming system.
- posguy 10y agoIIRC it can give a 30% to 40% performance boost on APU based systems, as the increased bandwidth to the GPU allows for much faster processing. Alternatively, Intel decided to put a few hundred megs of cache on their iGPU, which has made their graphics performance much better, and lessened the gains from increased Ram speed. https://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory-bandwidth-amds-kaveri/ https://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory-...
- user5994461 10y agoGamer machines don't use APU, they have a dedicated graphic card.
- user5994461 10y agoAbout 1% last I've seen benchmarks about that. It's so little, it's rather difficult to measure and it doesn't justify the investment.