It's not that there's a blocker. It's that it takes roughly 3x the manufacturing capacity to produce an HBM package at the same storage capacity as DRAM. We are sacrificing total bytes for bandwidth.
How so? FEOL is pretty much the same, BEOL is almost the same save TSVs, the packaging tech is different and more advanced, but not exactly 1:1 comparable. Do TSVs really occupy 3x the area of DDR IO's?
I think people might prefer the lower idle power consumption from lpddr over the better bandwidth in hbm in battery powered stuff. That said right now the price is definitely preventing us from finding out.
That hasn't been true since early HBM2 days, before the controllers standardized on power/voltage management and did things like leave them in P0 to ship on time
In one sense, nothing, in another, everything. It is DRAM, but the bandwidth requirements mean it’s paired to a processor, i.e. no DIMMs. Not 100% sure but things like MacBooks and the Framework tower, where you have fixed RAM for the device lifetime, have ~0 tradeoff.
Yup, the only reason Macs have higher memory bandwidth is because they use more memory channels, which gives them a wider bus. Both Intel and AMD only allow more than dual channel memory on server class processors these days.
The “Apple only does X better because they do Y” thing has been a meme for ages. I remember dismissals like “PowerPC is only faster at math because it has more integer units” or something along those lines, and thinking, uh, isn’t that a good thing?
More channels or soldered memory? Channels are basically RAID 0 so it depends what you're measuring. Soldering memory down was the only way to use LPDDR5X so if you wanted the best memory you had to solder it down. LPCAMM2 exists though so newer devices can use that instead of soldering them down, but not all devices would be able to fit the required LPCAMM2 slots.
The normal non-tech-savvy person already does this. They simply don't know that their ram is upgradeable or something else breaks first, before having to touch ram.
HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM are NOT the DDR4/5 that consumer markets need. Capacity allocation is leaning more to data center grade HBMs so less to produce dedicated DDR4/5 DRAMs. Supply demand will further drive up the consumer DRAM price! Note, the article mentions NO of new fabs is being constructed (all semiconductor manufacturers know that constructing more fabs means the boom/burst cycle will eventually kill them, so no one create more fabs) Perhaps the federal government need to step in here - the market doesn't fit the issue.
Depends on what proportion of Samsung's output is current HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM.
Everything in their statement can be true and it be a bad thing for consumers of non-HBM RAM.
"HBM capacity to expand to 250,000 wafers a month"
So let's say their current HBM capacity is 100k wafers/month (pure speculation/random number for illustration), and their total RAM capacity (including HBM( is 300k wafers/month, then non-HBM capacity reduces from 200k to 50k.
And it's worse than that, Micron said that converting capacity to HBM was at a 3:1 ratio, so that 250k HBM could be up to 750k in non-HBM. Fortunately, some of the increase is due to improved processes.
Keep in mind that total manufacturing capacity is increasing as well. Perhaps not enough to fully offset, but it's incorrect to assume that supply capacity is flat.
Part of the implication is that factories that could be producing consumer-facing DRAM like DDR5 would be retooled to produce HBM instead, leading to even less total consumer RAM production.
If Samsung is limited in the number of wafers they can process per month and they use more of those to produce HBM they necessarily have less of them left to make other products, like consumer DRAM.
During the Covid global chip shortage Intel announced new factories to address the production bottleneck, before the factories even started to be constructed, the shortage was long over and the projects were eventually canceled.
That's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead.
We're not seeing the progress in those "frontier models" that we have previously seen. There's certainly still gas left in tank tank, but we're way into the diminishing returns by now.
Cloud inference still beats hardware investments by orders of magnitude of course, but that's only if your data doesn't really matter to you.
Well I mean if I wanted to be extra pedantic, I would argue that we've been in that phase since LLMs were first introduced.
Before that, we had 0.
After that, we had more than 1.
A leap as far as that is hard to recreate.
But that wasn't my point. That's just trolling.
The actual point is that LLMs aren't gaining new capabilities anymore. They just get more reliable at the ones they already have; turning what was a coin flip to some higher probability.
That's (intuitively speaking, not strictly mathematically speaking) kinda the mathematical definition of diminishing returns.
It's going to happen very soon, which is why these frontier labs are scrambling to shut down open source language models. There's an existential risk threatening their obscene returns.
I’m not so sure about that. Already AI vendors are back to cutting prices to try and keep customers from cutting back on their usage. My own employer is working hard at pivoting to much smaller fine-tuned models for established use cases, and seeing model performance improvement in addition to large inference cost reductions. Being able to run them locally hasn’t exactly been a disaster for devex, either.
It may turn out that demand for SOTA frontier models isn’t so limitless after all.
This + your ROI in $10k device will be always lower than busy datacenter, its literally math. They sell free compute to others when you dont use it, you will never sell at that level or even you magically sell home compute, you will not compete at price
Not at all, I’m going to relax with a cooling drink and watch the consequences of this unbelievably destructive and wasteful venture implode. I also adore the idea that it's on the customer to be "fair" to a company that dumped us a group in favor of chasing B2B money.
Samsung is already building another fab (which was originally suspended due to low memory prices years ago). Hopefully when it goes live in a few years it's not all dedicated to HBM for AI.
About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over
3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
> Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.
No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.
No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.
I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.
No. The other industries can bid for access to the resource, and under most circumstances, whether they are willing to bid higher tracks importance. Sometimes there are cases where something has significant positive externalities and so people are not willing to bid high enough, and then we can talk about some kind of government intervention (typically a subsidy that attempts to track the value of the externalities) but I don't see that applying here.
If others are willing to pay more, that a signal that more value is created if the resource goes to them rather than to the more price sensitive customers.
This logic falls apart completely when gamblers allocate one trillion to bidding up the price, denying access to the resource to people who are responsibly spending their own money. The ideal world of the imaginary perfect free market never takes into consideration the messiness of the real world, like the fact that people will spend extreme sums of money irrationally. It can take years for this effect to correct, damaging the market severely in the meantime.
Alternatively, the money invested can be rational because it prices out competitors and establishes a monopoly, after which point the monopolist earns their absurd investment back with complete control of the market. This is also bad.
You can reach any conclusion you want if you assume others are behaving irrationally. But why should I assume they are wrong instead of you being wrong?
What's the main blocker (other than the current inflated cost) for using HBM instead of DRAM as the primary memory for consumer electronics?
It's not that there's a blocker. It's that it takes roughly 3x the manufacturing capacity to produce an HBM package at the same storage capacity as DRAM. We are sacrificing total bytes for bandwidth.
How so? FEOL is pretty much the same, BEOL is almost the same save TSVs, the packaging tech is different and more advanced, but not exactly 1:1 comparable. Do TSVs really occupy 3x the area of DDR IO's?
See remark on the slide 11: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec... That presentation is by Micron.
direct link: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec...
3x is a reasonable figure. They are not literally that large, though.
>> What's the main blocker (other than the current inflated cost) for using HBM instead of DRAM as the primary memory for consumer electronics?
HBM is meant to be integrated into the same package as the CPU, so no more DIMM sockets. It also has higher latency apparently.
I think people might prefer the lower idle power consumption from lpddr over the better bandwidth in hbm in battery powered stuff. That said right now the price is definitely preventing us from finding out.
Idle yes, but HBM energy consumption / memory operations seems to be a bit better than DRAM.
Only if you’re running at 100%. Consumers generally do not.
That hasn't been true since early HBM2 days, before the controllers standardized on power/voltage management and did things like leave them in P0 to ship on time
HBM is a stack of DRAMs, so there is no “instead”.
The vias to enable stacking is a significant amount of the die area.
In one sense, nothing, in another, everything. It is DRAM, but the bandwidth requirements mean it’s paired to a processor, i.e. no DIMMs. Not 100% sure but things like MacBooks and the Framework tower, where you have fixed RAM for the device lifetime, have ~0 tradeoff.
Nothing except CPU manufacturer choices. Mac laptops use it and they're consumer products.
People will have to get used to buying a fixed amount of RAM with their CPU but thats unlikely to be a problem.
Apple's "unified memory" marketing is so strong that even tech literate people seem to have this false idea!
They have managed to pull this sort of thing off many many times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
Yup, the only reason Macs have higher memory bandwidth is because they use more memory channels, which gives them a wider bus. Both Intel and AMD only allow more than dual channel memory on server class processors these days.
The “Apple only does X better because they do Y” thing has been a meme for ages. I remember dismissals like “PowerPC is only faster at math because it has more integer units” or something along those lines, and thinking, uh, isn’t that a good thing?
MacBooks use regular soldered lpddr5(x) RAM. Same RAM as every other laptop manufacturer, they just use more lanes to achieve a higher bandwidth.
Perhaps more noteworthy for general home and business computing, doesn’t it also allow for lower latency?
More channels or soldered memory? Channels are basically RAID 0 so it depends what you're measuring. Soldering memory down was the only way to use LPDDR5X so if you wanted the best memory you had to solder it down. LPCAMM2 exists though so newer devices can use that instead of soldering them down, but not all devices would be able to fit the required LPCAMM2 slots.
The normal non-tech-savvy person already does this. They simply don't know that their ram is upgradeable or something else breaks first, before having to touch ram.
> Mac laptops use it and they're consumer products
No, Mac laptops use LPDDR, currently LPDDR5X.
pretty sure its lpddr not hbm.
A shame that this should if anything, lead to consumer DRAM prices getting even worse.
Why would more RAM supply lead to higher consumer prices?
HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM are NOT the DDR4/5 that consumer markets need. Capacity allocation is leaning more to data center grade HBMs so less to produce dedicated DDR4/5 DRAMs. Supply demand will further drive up the consumer DRAM price! Note, the article mentions NO of new fabs is being constructed (all semiconductor manufacturers know that constructing more fabs means the boom/burst cycle will eventually kill them, so no one create more fabs) Perhaps the federal government need to step in here - the market doesn't fit the issue.
Plus it takes 3x the wafer capacity for hbm than the same byte capacity in dram, so we’ll likely see the consumer market be decimated here
Might lower the prices of Mac Minis, Studios etc though
No, those use LPDDR5(x), not HBM.
Depends on what proportion of Samsung's output is current HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM.
Everything in their statement can be true and it be a bad thing for consumers of non-HBM RAM.
"HBM capacity to expand to 250,000 wafers a month"
So let's say their current HBM capacity is 100k wafers/month (pure speculation/random number for illustration), and their total RAM capacity (including HBM( is 300k wafers/month, then non-HBM capacity reduces from 200k to 50k.
And it's worse than that, Micron said that converting capacity to HBM was at a 3:1 ratio, so that 250k HBM could be up to 750k in non-HBM. Fortunately, some of the increase is due to improved processes.
Keep in mind that total manufacturing capacity is increasing as well. Perhaps not enough to fully offset, but it's incorrect to assume that supply capacity is flat.
Part of the implication is that factories that could be producing consumer-facing DRAM like DDR5 would be retooled to produce HBM instead, leading to even less total consumer RAM production.
If Samsung is limited in the number of wafers they can process per month and they use more of those to produce HBM they necessarily have less of them left to make other products, like consumer DRAM.
Memory allocated for HBM is memory taken away from DDR production.
Gamma squeezed by the AI business, that's why. The more you add the fuel, the further it will pump up.
Presumably DRAM production capacity gets reallocated to HBM, not sure.
Depends on how quickly they are sold.
Will that be enough for AI's hunger?
During the Covid global chip shortage Intel announced new factories to address the production bottleneck, before the factories even started to be constructed, the shortage was long over and the projects were eventually canceled.
It will be just in time for when AI will run very well on consumer hardware and the need for data centers will collapse.
There will be demand for both
That's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead.
I'm not sure if this prediction will hold true.
We're not seeing the progress in those "frontier models" that we have previously seen. There's certainly still gas left in tank tank, but we're way into the diminishing returns by now.
Cloud inference still beats hardware investments by orders of magnitude of course, but that's only if your data doesn't really matter to you.
they really dont want to hear this bro lol
We are certainly not in the diminishing returns phase for LLM progress. No sign of that yet.
Well I mean if I wanted to be extra pedantic, I would argue that we've been in that phase since LLMs were first introduced.
Before that, we had 0. After that, we had more than 1.
A leap as far as that is hard to recreate.
But that wasn't my point. That's just trolling.
The actual point is that LLMs aren't gaining new capabilities anymore. They just get more reliable at the ones they already have; turning what was a coin flip to some higher probability.
That's (intuitively speaking, not strictly mathematically speaking) kinda the mathematical definition of diminishing returns.
It's going to happen very soon, which is why these frontier labs are scrambling to shut down open source language models. There's an existential risk threatening their obscene returns.
I’m not so sure about that. Already AI vendors are back to cutting prices to try and keep customers from cutting back on their usage. My own employer is working hard at pivoting to much smaller fine-tuned models for established use cases, and seeing model performance improvement in addition to large inference cost reductions. Being able to run them locally hasn’t exactly been a disaster for devex, either.
It may turn out that demand for SOTA frontier models isn’t so limitless after all.
This + your ROI in $10k device will be always lower than busy datacenter, its literally math. They sell free compute to others when you dont use it, you will never sell at that level or even you magically sell home compute, you will not compete at price
Or even more amusing in time for the bubble to burst, I hope the big RAM makers end up holding the whole bag for that. Greedy bastards.
Since you’re not greedy when there is a memory glut I’m sure you’ll be willing to pay extra to make it fair.
Not at all, I’m going to relax with a cooling drink and watch the consequences of this unbelievably destructive and wasteful venture implode. I also adore the idea that it's on the customer to be "fair" to a company that dumped us a group in favor of chasing B2B money.
Their choice, their consequences.
Samsung is already building another fab (which was originally suspended due to low memory prices years ago). Hopefully when it goes live in a few years it's not all dedicated to HBM for AI.
Not until the industry gets severe indigestion, which doesn't seem that far off.
Not even close.
The beginning of the bubble pop?
Now make some DDR5.
About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over 3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
> Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.
No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.
Several of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel.
No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.
I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.
How much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed?
Can that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest?
What abuse? Responding to supply and demand fluctuations isn't abuse, it's the proper operation of the market.
Would if one industry gobbles up an important resource to the point that other consumers lose practical access to it, shouldn't there be limits?
No. The other industries can bid for access to the resource, and under most circumstances, whether they are willing to bid higher tracks importance. Sometimes there are cases where something has significant positive externalities and so people are not willing to bid high enough, and then we can talk about some kind of government intervention (typically a subsidy that attempts to track the value of the externalities) but I don't see that applying here.
If others are willing to pay more, that a signal that more value is created if the resource goes to them rather than to the more price sensitive customers.
This logic falls apart completely when gamblers allocate one trillion to bidding up the price, denying access to the resource to people who are responsibly spending their own money. The ideal world of the imaginary perfect free market never takes into consideration the messiness of the real world, like the fact that people will spend extreme sums of money irrationally. It can take years for this effect to correct, damaging the market severely in the meantime.
Alternatively, the money invested can be rational because it prices out competitors and establishes a monopoly, after which point the monopolist earns their absurd investment back with complete control of the market. This is also bad.
You can reach any conclusion you want if you assume others are behaving irrationally. But why should I assume they are wrong instead of you being wrong?
Where is the additional supply resulting from the sustained increase in demand?
Some are building new fabs, example:
https://news.skhynix.com/en/fab-facility-investment-2026/
It's not an overnight thing obviously.
I'm surprised this is getting posted on hn
Why wouldn't it get posted here?