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

562 points · 458 comments · giuliomagnifico

HarHarVeryFunny · 1789937583 · 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. jacquesm · 1789951954 · focus · HN ↗
  The only thing the West is achieving here is that sooner or later China will be able to compete on their own terms rather than ours. It may buy some time but the end result is very predictable.
  1. bigcat12345678 · 1789960301 · focus · HN ↗
    As other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competition, they'll have the moral high ground of being out of self-reliance and hostility by western monopolists.
    Edit:
    And, that, my fellow keyboard high-minded thinker but powerless corp peons, was also part of the China's plan all along.
    fangspire · 1789965791 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    vkou · 1789973334 · focus · HN ↗
    > Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate?
    No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, all have similar fertility rates.
    rmunn · 1789976036 · focus · HN ↗
    But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
    vkou · 1789982694 · focus · HN ↗
    And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China.
    On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
    ricardobayes · 1789989786 · focus · HN ↗
    China is headed for a demographic disaster, though. High schools are incredibly packed, middle schools, not so much and primary schools and kindergartens are kind of empty.
    lazide · 1789994481 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone is, not just China.
    belowavgiq · 1789996422 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone stupid enough to let that happen is.
    There is a handful of developed countries where this is not an issue.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1789999278 · focus · HN ↗
    It's hard to say that it's stupidity (at least not country-specific stupidity) - it seems that globally, presumably due to the state of the world along many axis, many people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's happening on a large enough scale to have major consequences for things like the size of your tax base, trying to keep your economy growing, demographic concerns over an aging population with no-one to look after or pay for them etc, etc.
    Different countries are handling this in different ways, with encouraging immigration being the major one. Japan is facing a major lack of workers, with many businesses having to shut down as a result, but have decided to tackle it in a different way relying on advanced robotics as an alternative to immigration.
    There are very few developed countries NOT having this problem. Most of the population growth is in poorer parts of the world like Africa.
    belowavgiq · 1790000446 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, if there are >0 developed countries that have solved this (Israel, the GCC, dare I say fairly well-off MENA countries like Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, etc., and to a minor degree Botswana) then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse.
    Going purely by the evolution theory and natural selection, having so few children that there is a serious risk a population will disappear in a century or two, means losing. Needless to say, this is stupid. From the entire American continent, to Europe, India more recently, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Japan.
    Africans, Arabs, and some non-Arab Muslim populations will carry the torch. Much respect for not falling into the trap.
    pixl97 · 1790003132 · focus · HN ↗
    > then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse.
    Honestly you're reading the data completely wrong. You cannot look at it at the country level. In Israel for example the populations that are producing the most population are highly religious and less educated than those that are producing less population.
    It's more about memes. Religion is a meme driven breeding cult. This is why said religions tend to have very long term staying power. The particular problem here is these religions come at a cost of having to ignore a lot of reality to get to that point. Because they are faith based anything that presents a direct challenge to that faith must be setup as an enemy or it may risk the religion. Yes, religions can incorporate new information but it tends to be a slow process as it needs to involve slowly changing peoples mind to avoid instability.
    What this looks like in the long term is large populations of highly religious that have a fundamental disconnect from the technology that's keeping them alive. A new Late Bronze Age collapse.
    belowavgiq · 1790006479 · focus · HN ↗
    So? How does the population being religious disprove the fact that they are developed and having children? Not to mention that I have listed around ~10 countries after Israel.
    Uh... Meme-based? This is such an unserious argument I don't even know what I can possibly say to that.
    How are they disconnected with the technology keeping them alive? All people, in GCC countries especially, are working to make 1st world development happen.
    Implying that religious Jews or Muslims are stuck in the Bronze Age is ignoring reality. Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian, I thought this apparent conflict of ideas was something taught in schools.
    pixl97 · 1790009000 · focus · HN ↗
    First, you seems to think a meme is something unserious. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene so you know what meme actually stands for rather than the thing you see on Reddit.
    GCC countries are resource economies mostly. They must weave a very narrow path to success to non-oil based means of income or the entire region collapses. I will say they do realize this is a problem and are using oil money to diversify, but resource curses are very hard to break and collapse can happen very quickly.
    "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son's son will ride a camel." --Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
    >Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian
    This is just stating that that in 1700 you were a Christian or you got hung (hell, pre-independence America was founded by people that thought that too few people were being hung). As we see when you take out the hanging or social shame part of the religion people tend to flee them as they are oppressive structures. You could say them being men of science either had no bearing to their religion, or was in spite of their religion.
    I am saying, for example, that the Abrahamic religions are bronze age (ok, sorry, Iron age) social structures. I don't think studied scholars are going to disagree on that point very much. People saw how people worked and could be sheppereded in societies without formal education and turned it into a series of stories that were effective in modifying peoples behaviors. Kings later came along and added their stories so they could further control the population. Over time a semi-coherent story about how people worked was formed below a set of rather incoherent stories regarding things that didn't happen that people are supposed to accept with faith.
    lazide · 1790054620 · focus · HN ↗
    Notably, it is hilarious how ‘modern western society’ seems to believe that people somehow work differently than they always have, while clearly mimicking the same rough structures they are deriding.
    (Comic book superheros, cough cough. The references to Canon in what are essentially liturgical disagreements - I mean power scaling arguments - are particularly hilarious.)
    Not me of course, I’m different and unique. Just like everyone else.

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