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[–] 56 points 3 months ago (47 children)

At what point do we start making the factories ourselves? No really if ddr3 is significantly going up would it make sence for all these smaller companies to pool thier resources and start fabbing thier own chips?

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  • [–] 94 points 3 months ago (20 children)

    unfortunately chip foundries take years to set up (just filtering the air alone takes months), so it's not really a solution - although china is attempting to do exactly this.

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  • [–] 104 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (10 children)

    "It's hard work and it takes too long. China is trying to do it "

    2 years later and after China has done it, "why are the chinese taking the lead on all of this? we should be doing things more like China."

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  • [–] 71 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Sorry, I was perhaps unclear - China is and has been setting up chip foundaries regardless of the global memory prices, simply to have domestic production of those components. Production of memory modules during this period of AI ratfucking is just a happy bonus.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Yes because they have an autonomy incentive, but "our" (as in Western capitalism) incentives is solely on profit and profit is being done, therefore we will never solve this because in fact there's no problem. We are being mocked by all these PC parts suppliers.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    I don't think you're wrong, I'm just not sure how it relates to what I said.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    But they really wanted to shit on capitalism regardless of context.

    What's weird is that capitalism should be driving others to set up fabs because it is so profitable.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    The fact it runs on profit is not the deciding factor in this case. If the RAM manufacturers had more capacity, they would profit even more. The main problem is that those factories are huge investments that you would need to commit until the finish-line successfully without going bankrupt before you will be able to produce anything. China can take this risk because state funds and actual geopolitical justifications. Western countries can say to themselves too easily that they can keep buying it from Asia, which causes no countries or investors to want to commit to a similar project.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

    Haven’t they been drooling over Taiwan’s tech and foundries for years now?

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    More or less, though they recently bought their way in to a domestic EUV foundry so their coveting of TSMC will likely reduce in the near future as that comes online.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    Why filter the air at all? Why not just turn the clean room into a vacuum? No air contaminants since there's no air. All the stuff in there looks to be automated anyway.

    I have no idea how silicon fabs work so this probably isn't realistic.

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  • [–] 45 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Many reasons! The enormous building imploding is probably the big one, but risks from cold welding, use of atmospheric cooling, relying on exposure to atmosphere for many steps in the process, etc. are all additional factors. It's a good question though.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    I can just see makers starting to do small scale projects such as https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/russian-enthusiasts-are-building-their-own-ddr5-ram-amidst-the-worldwide-shortage-as-easy-as-sourcing-your-own-memory-modules-and-soldering-them-on-empty-pcbs

    And then naturally expanding. I mean we talk about all these hypotheticals but at a certain price range, impractical turns practical. If you cannot convince any big chip makers to make your thing and people will pay 2x for your thing, then getting together with smaller manufacturing starts to make sense.

    I dunno im just a small maker person. Made my own laptop from parts and all that. I see this as a potential opportunity.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    There is a guy on YouTube doing it and making videos about the process. He turned his shed into a clean room lol.

    https://youtu.be/h6GWikWlAQA

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  • Sure. A hobbyist with the right equipment can make technically functional memory as a scientific curiosity. But making any memory module that is as powerful as anything that's come out in the last twenty years is going to require millions of dollars in investment and years of effort combining the work of thousands.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    Nobody (aside from China, for purely geopolitical reasons) really wants to invest billions of dollars in a multiple years long process that could be instantly undermined by the popping of the AI bubble.

    This level of demand is not sustainable, and the big tech companies know it.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    This isn't really accurate, there's been literally hundreds of billions invested over the past several years. The only reason prices are predicted to normalize after 2028 is because that's when the new fabs come online that those investments are paying for.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Who do you think is going to be buying DRAM at the current prices in 2027?

    Before the bubble, there used to be oversupply of DRAM leading to price fixing scandals, that's what will eventually happen again.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Probably anyone who wants RAM. 2027 production is mostly already sold, the shortage isn't going away until there's more fabs. 2027 is more likely to see higher prices than lower.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Production being sold out doesn't mean anything when there are no commercial entities left to actually pay the bill.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    You should look into what is actually going on in the industry, the bills are getting paid. Companies are even pre-paying for future allocations, and there is a transition towards 5 year contracts.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Unfortunately, we're not going to get an over supply of DRAM once the bubble pops.

    Most of the current production is HBM, which is juuust architecturally different enough from DRAM to not be useful for desktop computers

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    I was under the impression that the underlying memory chips are the ones we have a shortage of, and HBM is just one way to package them?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    what we actually have a shortage of is the underlying memory chip fabs. That is, the machines that can take the silicon and stamp them into DRAM/HBM/whatever else you need.

    So, once the bubble pops and enough of those free up to (potentially) resume manufacturing DRAM sticks at the rate they were back in 2025, we'll get regular inventory again, but there won't be a surplus.

    You can't pluck out the silicon from an already built chip and shove it in another, unfortunately 😅, and I don't think anyone will be able to build an adapter that lets you plug HBM into DRAM slots because they're architecturally just different enough for that to be infeasible.

    So that will leave all those AI machines as scrap the hyperscalers have to deal with, but won't help the rest of us.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I thought ireland and a couple of other countries are stepping up quite a bit recently? I know they have been at the forfront of the EUs efforts to start building chips and have been doing so last 10 years to start scaling.

    Just did a search, looks like its going to happen: https://wallstreettimes.com/intel-foundry-5-billion-ireland-chip-manufacturing-2026/

    This level of demand is not sustainable Totally agree!

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago*

    It takes 4-5 years to build a new memory fab from scratch for companies in the industry.

    They're talking about no price reductions for 1.5 years.

    (And the reason they're saying that is because the first significant new production capacity isn't expected to be up until mid-2027 and isn't expected to be scaled up to full production until 2028.)

    And they already moved that forward by something like six months, probably by spending more on stuff like construction, so I doubt that there's more slack to eliminate. Can't just speed it up a little more.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It upfront investment cost is simply too much to just start manufacturing your own chips. Just the fab alone would take around 20-30 billion and 4-6 years to build. Then add another couple of billions and 3-4 years to design a DDR5 chip that would give comparable performance to what the big 3 manufacture.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    It’s decades away. Making dumb chips is possible, but we lack the supply chains, infrastructure, and learned knowledge of making advanced tech.

    If you doubt this look at how intel and nvidia are having a hard time in making usable chips on US soil.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Nice profile pic. I've been wanting to find a maker/tinkerer community on lemmy but I haven't come across one yet. Am I just not looking hard enough? I love seeing and discussing people's DIY electronics / 3D printed projects.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Your client shows profile pics?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I used to use sync, but it's been abandoned and I heard from other former sync users that summit had a comparable feature set, so I switched to that. Summit shows profile pics next to each user.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Theres some. Honestly more people are on mastodon than lemmy. It hasnt taken off like the mastodon crowd. If you do #maker on mastodon.social for example, its much better.

    I wish the threadiverse supported hashtags and more mastodon stuff but it is what it is.

    Thanks!

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