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Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

562 points · 458 comments · giuliomagnifico

  1. HarHarVeryFunny · · focus · HN ↗
    On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment.

    The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.

    The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.

    1. vatsachak · · focus · HN ↗
      China should invest in an analog inference chip. It's a hail mary but why not.
      1. danielheath · · focus · HN ↗
        The two challenges there are firstly - that analog design has been a separate electrical engineering school for most of a century, so there are few who could design it - and secondly - that every single chip will have subtle variations in its computations, necessitating some sort of model finetuning per chip. Possibly the chip could be characterised at the factory, and ship with the characterisation data burned into a controller rom or something, but if that doesn’t pan out the whole thing is likely a non-starter.

        If it could be made to work, you could run a fable-grade model in tens of watts.

        1. simondotau · · focus · HN ↗
          Or we treat them like humans and make each one do job interviews to work out what tasks they’re suited for.
          1. mindok · · focus · HN ↗
            This made me smile. A true test of human-like intelligence. Maybe they could take some entry level jobs (“I can make a nice Wordpress site”) and build a CV?
          2. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
            It's the hidden sociopath that's able to mirror a functional entity that I'd be a bit worried about in these cases. Damn thing would make CEO quick.
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