[malshe]

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.

[nirui]

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.

[15155]

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.

[hinkley]

Does that mean we should be designing HBM into consumer devices?

[alephnerd]

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...

[jorvi]

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.

[Ygg2]

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.

[nl]

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.

[numpad0]

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.

[malshe]

That's a good point.