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They can probably afford to do both.

Does that include yield from packaging?

I don't fully understand the source of the "total bytes" constraint, but a major factor may be because HBM4 / HBM4E can only make use of the footprint directly above the processor/logic die (or in direct vicinity of its interconnect), while traditional DRAM can be placed further away where there's lots of real estate on the motherboard.

I gather a practical max ceiling today is a stack of 16 chips in height yielding 64GB?

These chips have a massive bus size of 2048 bits, instead of the 64 or 128 bits (dual channel) used by DDR5. That's what gives them their order-of-magnitude bandwidth speedup. But even though they technically pack in more capacity per square millimeter of motherboard, I gather they take up more space than older technologies once you account for the vias and interconnects to route all those signals.

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?

Idle yes, but HBM energy consumption / memory operations seems to be a bit better than DRAM.

SIMD (and especially the modern matrix extensions) can use as much bandwidth you can throw at it.

Right but if HBM memory is all that people want to produce, then building a CPU which can use it use it would be useful on it's own merits.

But in reality we also already have unified memory architecture systems, integrated graphics etc.

The vias to enable stacking is a significant amount of the die area.

Apple's "unified memory" marketing is so strong that even tech literate people seem to have this misconception!

They have managed to pull this sort of thing off many many times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

MacBooks use regular soldered lpddr5(x) RAM. Same RAM as every other laptop manufacturer, they just use more lanes to achieve a higher bandwidth.

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.

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.

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.

Memory allocated for HBM is memory taken away from DDR 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.

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.

What if the AI companies start selling the hardware with their models?

I.e., you get a locked down device with access to their AI and maybe a way to run third party apps. Of course the developers of those apps will have to pay a percentage of their revenue.

Sound familiar?

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.

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.

If it doesn’t fit it’s no use to me.

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.

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?

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?

Where is the additional supply resulting from the sustained increase in demand?

Damn you were lucky. I bought 96GB DDR5 last year for £600 UKP. They're now retailing for three times that.

Bastards.