5 ms·

Since I'm in China, I took a look at Taobao hoping to find cheaper ddr5 sticks made with CXMT chips. Unfortunately, they are the same price or only marginally c

by dworks 9mo ago

Since I'm in China, I took a look at Taobao hoping to find cheaper ddr5 sticks made with CXMT chips. Unfortunately, they are the same price or only marginally cheaper than Hynix sticks (1900 - 2300 rmb for 32g ddr5). Perhaps capacity at CXMT is not very high yet.

amluto 9mo ago
Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50? Or the supply of non-CXMT DRAM is sufficient poor right now that Chinese buyers, of which there are plenty, are willing to pay approximately as much for CXMT’s product as for anyone else’s? CXMT’s real ability to reduce prices will come (if it does) by adding enough supply to drive down prices everywhere, or at least everywhere that is willing to import CXMT’s products without absurd tariffs.
- walterbell 9mo ago
  That depends on whether your investor (China) also sells integrated products whose sales would increase if RAM were cheaper, e.g. smartphones or mini PCs with bundled LPDDR5, https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/your-laptop-is-about-to-become-a-casualty-of-the-ai-grift https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/your-laptop-is-abou... Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators. This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly.
  - dworks 9mo ago
    Mini PCs seems to be the perfect vector, since the only serious manufacturers are Chinese brands. International brands only seem to dabble in this sector.
    - walterbell 9mo ago
      If (SO)DIMM memory prices rise to the stratosphere while integrated memory in Chinese mini PCs remain relatively affordable, from 16GB Intel N150 to 128GB AMD Strix Halo for Edge AI, there will be industry-altering consequences that persist long after DRAM pseudo-shortages end. Oligopolists can relearn old lessons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma New companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business.
      - dworks 9mo ago
        Indeed. I am waiting to buy a Strix Halo on Taobao when supply has been replenished. I asked the manufacturer if price would remain the same after restocking, they said they weren't sure. They re-stock in the middle of January, so it will be interesting to see what the price ends up being. I wonder if there is any advantage of having integrated memory in this regard?
        walterbell 9mo ago
        > any advantage of having integrated memory Power efficiency. Strix Halo also offers unified CPU/GPU memory with 256 GB/s memory bandwidth, which brings it closer to Apple Silicon performance for local LLMs, https://chipsandcheese.com/p/strix-halos-memory-subsystem-tackling https://chipsandcheese.com/p/strix-halos-memory-subsystem-ta... Another opportunity is low-latency storage with millions of IOPS. Nvidia is rebooting Intel's cancelled (see eBay) Optane for "AI Storage". Future Mini PCs and LLM accelerators for Narrow/Edge AI industrial use could benefit from high-IOPS storage, https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-and-kioxia-target-100-million-iops-ssd-in-2027-33-times-more-than-existing-drives-for-exclusive-use-in-ai-servers https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-and-kioxia...
    - toast0 9mo ago
      I know there's more variety and typically lower prices (and sketchier windows licenses) from the Chinese brands, but last I looked, there's lots of options if you want an established brand. You can even get them from the likes of HP, Dell, Lenovo (still chinese, but), etc.
- dworks 9mo ago
  Why would I buy CXMT if it's virtually the same price as Hynix? Edit: I see you made an edit without noting that you did so. Only this sentence was in the pre-edit comment: "Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50?" For your added comments: There is no supply issue, there are hundreds of sellers of Hynix, Crucial, Samsung ddr5 on Taobao. For your second comment about them driving down prices later on by increasing supply, well, I first of all noted that perhaps capacity is not great in my comment, and you are also contradicting your first point where you said CXMT would be stupid to compete on price. In reality, the history of every Chinese market entrant, even those leading technologically, shows that they always cut margins to compete by driving down costs. I have a decade worth of experience related to this. I believe CXMT simply has not gotten to the stage where they really try to win market share and crank up supply - perhaps due to lack of capital, or as I said, due to capacity limitations (which may be a result of capital).
  - eunos 9mo ago
    I'm not even sure most people know the difference. RAM is RAM for most people, that know and willing to buy RAM sticks on their own.
- heavyset_go 9mo ago
  If they have the runway, they can try the tried and true method of undercutting competitors until they fold, and then capture the market for themselves. Investors have the stomach for this tactic, surely a company with the state's backing can remain solvent even longer than those funded by private investors.
  - nijave 9mo ago
    Other nations would likely step in before letting China corner the DRAM market
    - walterbell 9mo ago
      Ending memory "shortage" due to OMEC production cuts of NAND wafers. Everyone wins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776
  - amluto 9mo ago
    I think the economics are wrong for this, at least so far. CXMT seems to be scaling up as fast as they can, and they have maybe 5% market share. They can’t flood the market with cheap DRAM because they don’t have enough DRAM yet — I’m not convinced they could materially impact anyone else’s profits even if they literally gave away their entire output. At best selling their product cheaply might help them gain some mindshare as integrators test it and hopefully discover that it meets the spec and works fine. What they need is capital and time with which to scale, and selling at a profit-maximizing price will get them the most capital, and this benefit may well exceed the actual profit on goods sold: the stock market might appreciate that they are profitable, thus making it easier for them to obtain funding under favorable terms. If they actually want to try to destroy their competitors by undercutting them, they need to be able supply enough DRAM to actually drive down the price. At the rate that the big buyers are buying DRAM, that will take several more years at least. I’m curious whether their presumed inability to buy ASML machines might actually help them. If they can meet the target DDR5 and HBM specs without EUV while maintaining decent yield and acceptable power consumption of the finished product, they may well be able to out-scale their competitors. I imagine it’s a lot easier to procure the equipment for additional DUV lines than EUV lines, especially with other Chinese vendors doing their best to supply semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
nirui 9mo ago
I'm watching the price refresh since last year, hoping the domestic manufacturers in China could rebalance the price a bit. Nope, it turned out that did not happen. It's a free money grab right now of course they raised their prices. But I guess Americans will not be buying Chinese RAMs/SSDs for critical applications (such as AI), and not a lot of user outside China will use Chinese AI due to restrictions such as censorship etc being enforced on it, limiting the growth and scale of the tech. So, there is still hope that some of the manufacturers will eventually pivot towards tried and true consumer products.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
ksec 9mo ago
>Perhaps capacity at CXMT is not very high yet. They failed to achieve quality and decent yield. And that is at least 10 years from DDR3 to DDR5. On the other hand YMTC from NAND space are moving to DRAM.
PixyMisa 9mo ago
Like Nanya in Taiwan, DDR5 production at CXMT is in its early stages and a small fraction of their overall shipments. Give it a year and that will likely change.

by dworks 9mo ago

amluto 9mo ago

Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50? Or the supply of non-CXMT DRAM is sufficient poor right now that Chinese buyers, of which there are plenty, are willing to pay approximately as much for CXMT’s product as for anyone else’s? CXMT’s real ability to reduce prices will come (if it does) by adding enough supply to drive down prices everywhere, or at least everywhere that is willing to import CXMT’s products without absurd tariffs.

walterbell 9mo ago
That depends on whether your investor (China) also sells integrated products whose sales would increase if RAM were cheaper, e.g. smartphones or mini PCs with bundled LPDDR5, https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/your-laptop-is-about-to-become-a-casualty-of-the-ai-grift https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/your-laptop-is-abou... Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators. This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly.
- dworks 9mo ago
  Mini PCs seems to be the perfect vector, since the only serious manufacturers are Chinese brands. International brands only seem to dabble in this sector.
  - walterbell 9mo ago
    If (SO)DIMM memory prices rise to the stratosphere while integrated memory in Chinese mini PCs remain relatively affordable, from 16GB Intel N150 to 128GB AMD Strix Halo for Edge AI, there will be industry-altering consequences that persist long after DRAM pseudo-shortages end. Oligopolists can relearn old lessons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma New companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business.
    - dworks 9mo ago
      Indeed. I am waiting to buy a Strix Halo on Taobao when supply has been replenished. I asked the manufacturer if price would remain the same after restocking, they said they weren't sure. They re-stock in the middle of January, so it will be interesting to see what the price ends up being. I wonder if there is any advantage of having integrated memory in this regard?
      - walterbell 9mo ago
        > any advantage of having integrated memory Power efficiency. Strix Halo also offers unified CPU/GPU memory with 256 GB/s memory bandwidth, which brings it closer to Apple Silicon performance for local LLMs, https://chipsandcheese.com/p/strix-halos-memory-subsystem-tackling https://chipsandcheese.com/p/strix-halos-memory-subsystem-ta... Another opportunity is low-latency storage with millions of IOPS. Nvidia is rebooting Intel's cancelled (see eBay) Optane for "AI Storage". Future Mini PCs and LLM accelerators for Narrow/Edge AI industrial use could benefit from high-IOPS storage, https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-and-kioxia-target-100-million-iops-ssd-in-2027-33-times-more-than-existing-drives-for-exclusive-use-in-ai-servers https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-and-kioxia...
  - toast0 9mo ago
    I know there's more variety and typically lower prices (and sketchier windows licenses) from the Chinese brands, but last I looked, there's lots of options if you want an established brand. You can even get them from the likes of HP, Dell, Lenovo (still chinese, but), etc.
dworks 9mo ago
Why would I buy CXMT if it's virtually the same price as Hynix? Edit: I see you made an edit without noting that you did so. Only this sentence was in the pre-edit comment: "Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50?" For your added comments: There is no supply issue, there are hundreds of sellers of Hynix, Crucial, Samsung ddr5 on Taobao. For your second comment about them driving down prices later on by increasing supply, well, I first of all noted that perhaps capacity is not great in my comment, and you are also contradicting your first point where you said CXMT would be stupid to compete on price. In reality, the history of every Chinese market entrant, even those leading technologically, shows that they always cut margins to compete by driving down costs. I have a decade worth of experience related to this. I believe CXMT simply has not gotten to the stage where they really try to win market share and crank up supply - perhaps due to lack of capital, or as I said, due to capacity limitations (which may be a result of capital).
- eunos 9mo ago
  I'm not even sure most people know the difference. RAM is RAM for most people, that know and willing to buy RAM sticks on their own.
heavyset_go 9mo ago
If they have the runway, they can try the tried and true method of undercutting competitors until they fold, and then capture the market for themselves. Investors have the stomach for this tactic, surely a company with the state's backing can remain solvent even longer than those funded by private investors.
- nijave 9mo ago
  Other nations would likely step in before letting China corner the DRAM market
  - walterbell 9mo ago
    Ending memory "shortage" due to OMEC production cuts of NAND wafers. Everyone wins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776
- amluto 9mo ago
  I think the economics are wrong for this, at least so far. CXMT seems to be scaling up as fast as they can, and they have maybe 5% market share. They can’t flood the market with cheap DRAM because they don’t have enough DRAM yet — I’m not convinced they could materially impact anyone else’s profits even if they literally gave away their entire output. At best selling their product cheaply might help them gain some mindshare as integrators test it and hopefully discover that it meets the spec and works fine. What they need is capital and time with which to scale, and selling at a profit-maximizing price will get them the most capital, and this benefit may well exceed the actual profit on goods sold: the stock market might appreciate that they are profitable, thus making it easier for them to obtain funding under favorable terms. If they actually want to try to destroy their competitors by undercutting them, they need to be able supply enough DRAM to actually drive down the price. At the rate that the big buyers are buying DRAM, that will take several more years at least. I’m curious whether their presumed inability to buy ASML machines might actually help them. If they can meet the target DDR5 and HBM specs without EUV while maintaining decent yield and acceptable power consumption of the finished product, they may well be able to out-scale their competitors. I imagine it’s a lot easier to procure the equipment for additional DUV lines than EUV lines, especially with other Chinese vendors doing their best to supply semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

nirui 9mo ago

I'm watching the price refresh since last year, hoping the domestic manufacturers in China could rebalance the price a bit. Nope, it turned out that did not happen. It's a free money grab right now of course they raised their prices. But I guess Americans will not be buying Chinese RAMs/SSDs for critical applications (such as AI), and not a lot of user outside China will use Chinese AI due to restrictions such as censorship etc being enforced on it, limiting the growth and scale of the tech. So, there is still hope that some of the manufacturers will eventually pivot towards tried and true consumer products.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

ksec 9mo ago

>Perhaps capacity at CXMT is not very high yet. They failed to achieve quality and decent yield. And that is at least 10 years from DDR3 to DDR5. On the other hand YMTC from NAND space are moving to DRAM.

PixyMisa 9mo ago

Like Nanya in Taiwan, DDR5 production at CXMT is in its early stages and a small fraction of their overall shipments. Give it a year and that will likely change.