5 ms·

SK hynix dethrones Samsung as world’s top DRAM maker

188 points by ksec 1y ago

walterbell 1y ago
> This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. Helpful footnote on man-machine boundary.
- jchw 1y ago
  Tangentially: LLMs are really impressive at translation. I guess it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise given where a lot of the most pivotal research came from, but still, the leading edge LLMs are extremely good for situations where having a human translator is infeasible or too expensive, and if you're worried about correctness you can go through and verify the translation using reference material and asking the LLM for more information about a given excerpt, which you can also verify against references and online discussions. I think my only concern is that I'm not sure how to make sure I'll always have an untainted set of reference material to check against in the post-LLM Internet. We've had LLM hallucinations result in software features. Are we possibly headed towards a world where LLM hallucinations occasionally reshape language and slang? I feel bad for human translators right now. For various use cases, current-day machine translations and especially LLM translations are sufficient. For those not versed in the world of otaku and video game nerds, one extremely fascinating development of the last few years is the one-shot commission platform Skeb, where people can send various kinds of art commission requests to Japanese artists. They integrate with DeepL to support requests from people who don't speak Japanese fluently, and it seems to generally work very well. (The lower-stakes nature of one-shot art commissions helps a bit here too, but at the least I think communication issues are rarely a huge problem, which is pretty impressive.) And that kicked off before LLMs started to push machine translations even further.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    I was watching a graphic novel on YouTube yesterday that was translated from Japanese text into an English narration. It was weird, not perfect, probably copyright infringement, but pretty effective. I think it’s only a matter of time until we have real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling, or heck, working in another country where you don’t speak the local language. Language barriers are going to fall quickly.
    - xeonmc 1y ago
      They could even make it fish-shaped!
      - whatevermom 1y ago
        If they don’t, I will.
    - lukax 1y ago
      Have you seen Soniox? They support real-time translation (only speech to text translation for now). https://soniox.com/ https://soniox.com/ (disclaimer: I worked there)
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        You know someone will figure out how to do real time translation and use the same voice as the speaker, or if you have a room with more than speaker, rather than figure out who you are listening to, just do them all and remix according to how the input sources were mixed.
        junon 1y ago
        There was just a demo for this posted like a week or two ago between an English and Korean speaker, I'll see if I can find it and edit/comment again.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    [flagged]
- thebruce87m 1y ago
  That paragraph itself could be spat out by the LLM too. I’m not saying it is, but it’s a depressing thought. Maybe in the future they will spit this out as a result of the training data today, e.g. this article.
  - anon-3988 1y ago
    Does it matter? Lets say it is translated by a person. So what? Is he qualified? Does he know technology enough to translate the terminologies properly? How do I even verify this?
neom 1y ago
Wonder if the reserved tables order in Apgujeong shifts too.
- jacob_rezi 1y ago
  I still reserve a couple every month. I live 2 blocks away
  - neom 1y ago
    I was referring to the fact that in Cheongdam many of the company man restaurants and clubs have a pecking order. Chey Tae-won now gets a better table? I wonder. :)
stogot 1y ago
I keep seeing this SK company’s brands everywhere. It’s a huge conglomerate, privately owned, that seems to be expanding rapidly and doing very well. Does anyone know why they’re so successful or is my misperception?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- b473a 1y ago
  They purchased Intel's entire NAND business a few years back, so they just kind of exploded into the SSD market. They sometimes sell their drives under the name Solidigm.
  - wtallis 1y ago
    I think SK Hynix's NAND business may have already been bigger than Intel's NAND business when they made that acquisition. Certainly by then SK Hynix had recovered from being late to the 3D NAND transition, while Intel was on a worse technological trajectory with their roadmap that diverged from the rest of the industry. Your impression that they were at all new to the SSD market is largely due to the fact that SK Hynix operated mainly as a component supplier, and has never pursued promotion of their own retail SSD brand the way Samsung does. Hynix was a major player in the NAND industry before the SSD market as we know it even existed, and has been a major supplier of SSDs to PC OEMs for as long as PC OEMs have been buying SSDs in large volumes.
    - baybal2 1y ago
      [dead]
- dv_dt 1y ago
  Imho, if they're well managed, any private enterprise that is capitalized and has a long term outlook can run circles around public company management that can barely keep a year of marketing strategy consistent, let alone deep technical development.
downrightmike 1y ago
Can we just make 64GB the minimum now please
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
  Are there aggregations of some accessible telemetry from a widely used application that reveal what is most common today?
  - bcraven 1y ago
    https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho
    - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
      Thanks, 35.15% on 32GB as well, getting there
      - Brybry 1y ago
        I believe most consumer CPUs only have 2 memory channels w/ 1 memory controller so unless they're using 64GB UDIMMs (which I believe do exist as of this year) then gamers seem limited to 64GB total ram (2x32GB) unless they want to drop their ram frequency. For example a 9950x3d officially supports 2 sticks at DDR5-5600 but 4 sticks at only DDR5-3600. [1] I had a friend run into this issue on AM5 when he was trying to use 4x32GB DDR5 on his gaming PC. [1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/9000-series/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/90...
        wtallis 1y ago
        There have been 48GB dual-rank DIMMs for about two years now, so 96GB using two slots and operating at high frequency has been an option. But even 64GB is still somewhat overkill for a gaming PC, putting you more into workstation territory.
mgh2 1y ago
Video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840229
somat 1y ago
So who makes the best ram? or is it largely interchangeable. Off the top of my head there is only like three manufacturers left. Micron being the only one not mentioned here.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 1y ago
  Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the only three manufacturers doing leading-edge DRAM manufacturing, but there are other companies like Nanya that do older DRAM types and specialized DRAM parts for eg. embedded and industrial applications rather than PC, servers, and phones. As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next, and also depends on what you consider "best": you might be looking for chips that overclock well in a desktop, or that are least likely to suffer compatibility issues and performance loss when maxing out the capacity in a desktop, or maybe "best" might mean who has the lowest-power LPDDR for your phone. The DRAM parts made by the big three largely all adhere to the same standards (thought not necessarily all supporting the same frequencies), with the most significant recent example being GDDR6X that was essentially a NVIDIA-Micron exclusive partnership. For the most part, it's the latest iteration of DDR (desktops and servers), LPDDR (handhelds and low-power laptops), GDDR (GPUs), and HBM (more expensive GPUs).
  - dehrmann 1y ago
    > As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next This reminds me of HDDs and SSDs, though I've always found RAM to be generally reliable or obviously bad, while storage can look ok for a while before it fails.
    - cm2187 1y ago
      And Samsung had a good reputation for enterprise SSD but obliterated it with pretty major firmware bugs (as in self destructing bugs, which they won’t patch without a support contract). SK Hynix seems to be a smaller player in that space.
thehumanmeat 1y ago
Slightly related, I've been wanting to invest in SK Hynix since early '23. Does anyone know how a US investor can get access to the stock? I haven't found any brokers that allow you to trade Korea Exchange tickers.
- cherryteastain 1y ago
  Interactive Brokers lets you trade HY9H and HXSCL which are secondary listings of SK Hynix on German and US exchanges respectively.
ajb 1y ago
I think it was Sophie Wilson who described the DRAM market as "a game of chicken with billions of dollars". Basically the market flip flops between glut and scarcity. When there are too many fabs, there is a glut and all the manufacturers grit their teeth and lose money, until one chickens out and closes a fab. Then prices go up and the ones still in the game make money, hand over fist, until too many fabs are built for the next generation of chips and the market flips back. I haven't personally checked this against market data, FWIW.
- ksec 1y ago
  That is correct. Even when we are only left with three DRAM foundry, all three were watching out whether one of them will build a new Fab. That has created an environment where no one wants to build it first unless they are absolutely sure, and when one will be built all other follows. And that is the reason why TSMC said they will never go into the DRAM business.

188 points by ksec 1y ago

> This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. Helpful footnote on man-machine boundary.

jchw 1y ago
Tangentially: LLMs are really impressive at translation. I guess it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise given where a lot of the most pivotal research came from, but still, the leading edge LLMs are extremely good for situations where having a human translator is infeasible or too expensive, and if you're worried about correctness you can go through and verify the translation using reference material and asking the LLM for more information about a given excerpt, which you can also verify against references and online discussions. I think my only concern is that I'm not sure how to make sure I'll always have an untainted set of reference material to check against in the post-LLM Internet. We've had LLM hallucinations result in software features. Are we possibly headed towards a world where LLM hallucinations occasionally reshape language and slang? I feel bad for human translators right now. For various use cases, current-day machine translations and especially LLM translations are sufficient. For those not versed in the world of otaku and video game nerds, one extremely fascinating development of the last few years is the one-shot commission platform Skeb, where people can send various kinds of art commission requests to Japanese artists. They integrate with DeepL to support requests from people who don't speak Japanese fluently, and it seems to generally work very well. (The lower-stakes nature of one-shot art commissions helps a bit here too, but at the least I think communication issues are rarely a huge problem, which is pretty impressive.) And that kicked off before LLMs started to push machine translations even further.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  I was watching a graphic novel on YouTube yesterday that was translated from Japanese text into an English narration. It was weird, not perfect, probably copyright infringement, but pretty effective. I think it’s only a matter of time until we have real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling, or heck, working in another country where you don’t speak the local language. Language barriers are going to fall quickly.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    They could even make it fish-shaped!
    - whatevermom 1y ago
      If they don’t, I will.
  - lukax 1y ago
    Have you seen Soniox? They support real-time translation (only speech to text translation for now). https://soniox.com/ https://soniox.com/ (disclaimer: I worked there)
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      You know someone will figure out how to do real time translation and use the same voice as the speaker, or if you have a room with more than speaker, rather than figure out who you are listening to, just do them all and remix according to how the input sources were mixed.
      - junon 1y ago
        There was just a demo for this posted like a week or two ago between an English and Korean speaker, I'll see if I can find it and edit/comment again.
faangguyindia 1y ago
[flagged]
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  [flagged]
thebruce87m 1y ago
That paragraph itself could be spat out by the LLM too. I’m not saying it is, but it’s a depressing thought. Maybe in the future they will spit this out as a result of the training data today, e.g. this article.
- anon-3988 1y ago
  Does it matter? Lets say it is translated by a person. So what? Is he qualified? Does he know technology enough to translate the terminologies properly? How do I even verify this?

neom 1y ago

Wonder if the reserved tables order in Apgujeong shifts too.

jacob_rezi 1y ago
I still reserve a couple every month. I live 2 blocks away
- neom 1y ago
  I was referring to the fact that in Cheongdam many of the company man restaurants and clubs have a pecking order. Chey Tae-won now gets a better table? I wonder. :)

stogot 1y ago

I keep seeing this SK company’s brands everywhere. It’s a huge conglomerate, privately owned, that seems to be expanding rapidly and doing very well. Does anyone know why they’re so successful or is my misperception?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
b473a 1y ago
They purchased Intel's entire NAND business a few years back, so they just kind of exploded into the SSD market. They sometimes sell their drives under the name Solidigm.
- wtallis 1y ago
  I think SK Hynix's NAND business may have already been bigger than Intel's NAND business when they made that acquisition. Certainly by then SK Hynix had recovered from being late to the 3D NAND transition, while Intel was on a worse technological trajectory with their roadmap that diverged from the rest of the industry. Your impression that they were at all new to the SSD market is largely due to the fact that SK Hynix operated mainly as a component supplier, and has never pursued promotion of their own retail SSD brand the way Samsung does. Hynix was a major player in the NAND industry before the SSD market as we know it even existed, and has been a major supplier of SSDs to PC OEMs for as long as PC OEMs have been buying SSDs in large volumes.
  - baybal2 1y ago
    [dead]
dv_dt 1y ago
Imho, if they're well managed, any private enterprise that is capitalized and has a long term outlook can run circles around public company management that can barely keep a year of marketing strategy consistent, let alone deep technical development.

downrightmike 1y ago

Can we just make 64GB the minimum now please

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
Are there aggregations of some accessible telemetry from a widely used application that reveal what is most common today?
- bcraven 1y ago
  https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    Thanks, 35.15% on 32GB as well, getting there
    - Brybry 1y ago
      I believe most consumer CPUs only have 2 memory channels w/ 1 memory controller so unless they're using 64GB UDIMMs (which I believe do exist as of this year) then gamers seem limited to 64GB total ram (2x32GB) unless they want to drop their ram frequency. For example a 9950x3d officially supports 2 sticks at DDR5-5600 but 4 sticks at only DDR5-3600. [1] I had a friend run into this issue on AM5 when he was trying to use 4x32GB DDR5 on his gaming PC. [1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/9000-series/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/90...
      - wtallis 1y ago
        There have been 48GB dual-rank DIMMs for about two years now, so 96GB using two slots and operating at high frequency has been an option. But even 64GB is still somewhat overkill for a gaming PC, putting you more into workstation territory.

mgh2 1y ago

Video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840229

somat 1y ago

So who makes the best ram? or is it largely interchangeable. Off the top of my head there is only like three manufacturers left. Micron being the only one not mentioned here.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wtallis 1y ago
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the only three manufacturers doing leading-edge DRAM manufacturing, but there are other companies like Nanya that do older DRAM types and specialized DRAM parts for eg. embedded and industrial applications rather than PC, servers, and phones. As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next, and also depends on what you consider "best": you might be looking for chips that overclock well in a desktop, or that are least likely to suffer compatibility issues and performance loss when maxing out the capacity in a desktop, or maybe "best" might mean who has the lowest-power LPDDR for your phone. The DRAM parts made by the big three largely all adhere to the same standards (thought not necessarily all supporting the same frequencies), with the most significant recent example being GDDR6X that was essentially a NVIDIA-Micron exclusive partnership. For the most part, it's the latest iteration of DDR (desktops and servers), LPDDR (handhelds and low-power laptops), GDDR (GPUs), and HBM (more expensive GPUs).
- dehrmann 1y ago
  > As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next This reminds me of HDDs and SSDs, though I've always found RAM to be generally reliable or obviously bad, while storage can look ok for a while before it fails.
  - cm2187 1y ago
    And Samsung had a good reputation for enterprise SSD but obliterated it with pretty major firmware bugs (as in self destructing bugs, which they won’t patch without a support contract). SK Hynix seems to be a smaller player in that space.

thehumanmeat 1y ago

Slightly related, I've been wanting to invest in SK Hynix since early '23. Does anyone know how a US investor can get access to the stock? I haven't found any brokers that allow you to trade Korea Exchange tickers.

cherryteastain 1y ago
Interactive Brokers lets you trade HY9H and HXSCL which are secondary listings of SK Hynix on German and US exchanges respectively.

ajb 1y ago

I think it was Sophie Wilson who described the DRAM market as "a game of chicken with billions of dollars". Basically the market flip flops between glut and scarcity. When there are too many fabs, there is a glut and all the manufacturers grit their teeth and lose money, until one chickens out and closes a fab. Then prices go up and the ones still in the game make money, hand over fist, until too many fabs are built for the next generation of chips and the market flips back. I haven't personally checked this against market data, FWIW.

ksec 1y ago
That is correct. Even when we are only left with three DRAM foundry, all three were watching out whether one of them will build a new Fab. That has created an environment where no one wants to build it first unless they are absolutely sure, and when one will be built all other follows. And that is the reason why TSMC said they will never go into the DRAM business.