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?
Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse'
Submitted 3 days ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
"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 chineses takes the head on all of this? we should be doing things more like China.”
Gork@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Why filter the air at all? Why not just turn the clean room into a vacuum? No air contaminants since there’s no air.
I have no idea how silicon fans work so this probably isn’t realistic.
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
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 camnot convice any big chip makers to make your thing and people will pay 2x for your thing, then getting togethervwith smaller manufacturing starts to make sence.
I dunno im just a small maker person. Made my own laptop from parts and all that. I see this as a potential opertunity.
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 3 days ago
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.
ultranaut@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
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!
tal@lemmy.today 3 days 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 thst 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.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 days ago
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.
BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 2 days ago
ASML has an order book running to 2028, the problem is it’s almost impossible to create a competitor to ASML - Demand for fabs is not the issue.
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
At scale sure. But for like a small controller or power supply?
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 3 days 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.
raspirate@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
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!
ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 3 days ago
TBF, from how they’ve described the situation it sounds like Valve has as much sway and insider knowledge as me or you. So I don’t think I’d trust their opinion here
brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I saw in an interview of their engineers that memory suppliers basically just say take it or leave it, at the risk of paying more later or having none at all.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 days ago
On the scale of all tech companies, Valve is very low down. Even Big Players like Amazon have trouble getting the best deals; if you’re not Apple or nVidia, you get to just go fuck yourself.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Lmao what makes you think even Apple has any special treatment?
wopalopa@lemmy.world 3 days ago
last i heard even nvidia having problem making gaming gpu that they’d slashed 50’s card production down. now im not sure how credible this source is but its pretty telling how bad the situation is rn. even if its a lie to slash unprofitable product line.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 days ago
Why do people think Valve has some godlike influence over everything? Sony has sold over 90 million PS5-s, Sony reduced its Playstation 5 manufacturing in part because they struggled to buy RAM. Valve has sold less than 5 million Steam Decks. If a hardware powerhouse like Sony can’t get all the RAM they want what makes you think Valve, who barely has presence in the global hardware market, has any sway in the global ram production?
Carmakazi@piefed.social 3 days ago
They certainly have a lot of motive to place blame for their own price increases, justified or not.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Maybe about the same sway but they are purchasing memory on a different market that is about future goods rather than goods currently sitting on shelves. So they will have more day to day visibility on RAM futures than your average consumer will. Price increases will happen there before they affect store shelves.
erre@programming.dev 1 day ago
Every day I pray the 6-year-old drives in my NAS don’t die.
salieri@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
One of mine died day before yesterday, had to buy a cople of new 8tb wd purples to rebuild a new raidz. 200 euro a pop, so painful. Almost 3 years ago i paid 300 euros for 3 8tb wd reds. The price increase has been devastating.
tal@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Earlier this month, research showed that memory prices are predicted to rise sharply between now and 2027, with no reductions expected until 2028. Now, Valve has shared its own view of the hardware market, and it’s equally glum.
That’s not really a position new to this month.
rf_@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If Valve said the crisis is going away soon people would then wait for the prices to come down. This is very basic manipulation to convince people to buy now.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Yeah, Valve is really having trouble moving those units. Never mind that they sold out in a couple days and have waitlists till next year
Benaaasaaas@group.lt 3 days ago
To buy what? They are out of stock
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Jesus Christ, who hurt you?
I mean that question rhetorically; I know who it was, it was everybody. So, I don’t blame you. But I do think you’re off base a bit on this one, specifically.
Especially considering the congruence with all of the evidence pointing to them telling the truth.
mursejoy@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Glad I stocked up on all my gaming hardware before all these price increases. I don’t see the need to upgrade anything for quite some time. If the hobby stays expensive in 5-7 years I’ll likely just downsize to a single ecosystem instead of having them all.
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I luckily stocked up on storage before the prices got crazy so I’m good there (although my RAID is gonna have to sit unfinished for a while), but I didn’t upgrade my RAM when I should have.
mursejoy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I am in the same boat. I have 28TB of storage, but I am sad I didn’t buy more. I will be hoping that these drives hold on until the prices return to semi-normal.
I stayed on AM4 and DDR4. I have been getting the absolute most out of that socket. Same B450 motherboard and swapped out my 3600 for a 5800x3D when prices were dirt cheap for that chip. I won’t upgrade until it dies or I can’t run the games I want anymore.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Okay Valve. Can YOU make memory?
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 3 days ago
No they can’t. Building a fab costs $10-20 billion and takes 2-4 years. And that’s assuming you have the people, the expertise, and the IP to be able to produce memory in your new fab.
Now Valve is privately held, 50+% owned by GabeN, so real numbers aren’t public. But it’s estimated to be worth around $20-40 billion. That’s why he can afford to spend his time driving around on yachts and submarines. That means if Valve wanted to, they might be able to get into the business.
But from a business POV, it’d be a HUGE risk. You’re betting basically half the company that you can go in with ZERO experience in semiconductor manufacturing and start making top tier memory, AND that by the time you can bring it to market there’ll still be any demand for it. That’s a BIG risk. And given that they’re making money hand over first selling hardware built by others, it’s not a risk they have any need to take.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
So there’s been a massive spike in demand for a product, that demand isn’t forecast to let up for the foreseeable future, and yet it’s outright impossible to get in on the action.
RAM is Lostech.
Jarix@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Imagine if valve put it’s money into making components like ram and storage just because the guys doing it already are hurting gamers
rafoix@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Making RAM requires billions of dollars in investment. That’s why there’s so few manufacturers worldwide. I highly doubt that Valve could afford it.
Jarix@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s unlikely for sure but not impossible as we have no idea what they actually haul in. They have been said to be worth 20-40 billion but they may be worth much more unbeknownst to us.
I also highly doubt it and said as much
ulkesh@piefed.social 3 days ago
If capitalism works, we’ll start to see competitors enter the market and prices would go down.
If capitalism worked.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 3 days ago
The problem is it’s not quite so easy.
If this was making things like cars or toilet paper, where the design and manufacturing methods are well understood, that’s exactly what would happen.
Making computer chips was well understood. You take a slice of single-crystal silicon, dope its surface with something, use a photo mask and a light to etch off the doping where you don’t want it. Repeat that process a few dozen or a few hundred times to etch transistors into the silicon, then slice it up into chips and package them.
Machines that do this are readily available.
The problem is, we made those transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller.
Then we ran into problems like how to etch features on the silicon that are smaller than the wavelength of light. And we found solutions to that. And so we made the transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller.
So now to create a current-gen computer chip, you need a process called EUV- Extreme Ultra Violet. Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, so when you want smaller wavelength to etch smaller features into the chip you eventually go from red to blue to ultraviolet and eventually to extreme ultraviolet. Problem THERE is there’s no EUV bulbs available, and if there were they’d be useless because atmospheric air absorbs EUV, and even if you do it in a vacuum glass absorbs EUV too. So you can only manipulate this light with mirrors, which have to be ground to an insane level of precision.
The resulting machine is quite impressive. You have a giant cavity kept in perfect vacuum. In one side you have an EUV source- that’s a little machine that dispenses a tiny droplet of tin, which as it falls is hit by a laser to blast it into a weird shape, then another much bigger laser that vaporizes it. In the process of vaporizing it releases EUV light. This light is reflected by shaped mirrors carved into the surfaces of the vacuum chamber that reflect and focus the EUV into a linear beam. Below that (also in vacuum) you have the mask and the wafer, and by moving them back and forth while the beam is active you etch features ‘smaller than light’ into the chip.
The result is a chip with current pathways less than 100 silicon atoms wide. And if you want to make current-gen computer memory, that’s the only way we’ve got to build it.
EUV machines are pretty much only made by one company, ASML. They cost a fortune and they’re in insanely high demand. Like I’ve heard of a guy getting hired by a company for over million a year simply because he’s friends with a purchasing manager at ASML and might be able to get the company that hired him a build slot.
And it’s not just buy the machine and hit ‘start’, there’s a ton of other stuff involved.
Bottom line- for a company that already has experience in current-gen chipmaking, setting up a fab like this costs $15-20 billion. And it isn’t just ‘sign a check and come back tomorrow’, the process of building a fab from the project being approved to the first wafer coming off the line is 2-3 years minimum.
Now here’s the bigger problem- semiconductors are always a cyclical market, or at least always have been. Demand (and thus prices) goes up, demand/prices come down. So if you invest $20 billion when prices are high, then in 2-3 years when the cycle is at its low nobody’s gonna be buying your output. And of course, adding more chips to the market will affect market prices (supply and demand). So companies that are building fabs have to look 5-10 years ahead to determine if they’ll get ROI on a fab before they build.
And that brings us to the next issue- with AI, we’re in uncharted territory. The computing market has been pretty well understood since the early 90s. There’s demand for PCs and laptops and servers and gadgets, and it goes up and down and new products come out that changes the mix of what’s ordered, but the cycle more or less continues. Up and down.
Then AI happens. And suddenly we have near-instant, unheard-of levels of demand. And it’s all for current-gen top-shelf stuff- HBM (high bandwidth memory) and GPUs and specialty silicon like NPUs.
Now there are more fabs being built. But it’s also starting to be better understood that AI is a bubble, which almost certainly will pop. So if you’re a DRAM maker and you spend $40 billion building a fleet of new fabs and then the bubble pops, you’re gonna be fucked. That’s why you don’t see everybody+dog diving into the DRAM market face first.
kuerbiskernoel@feddit.org 2 days ago
That’s probably the best comment Ive read so far on all of Lemmy, thanks!
dingleberrylover@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This was a very interesting read, thank you!
ultrafastsloth@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Just to add, since I didn’t see you mention it: even when you build a fab from scratch and know what to fabricate you need to find and hire people with the “know-how” on how to set the processes up.
qaz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Would DDR4 or DDR3 be easier to produce?
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
This could be an opportunity to arrive at a more sustainable baseline for personal computing, assuming it’s any easier to manufacture components along the lines of those that would have been made a decade ago. Computing power in the mid to late 10s was absolutely sufficient for modern use. Even going back a bit further, it’s not so much of a backslide.
The market needs to build its mid-range.
Jarix@lemmy.world 2 days ago
All true but it also assumes valve isn’t thinking post gaben
Building a fab now and getting the experience and expertise it needs to build next gen, such as abandoning silicon like the one article I saw said might be the direction things go in might be in valves orbit. Froml all accounts valve is highly profitable and could potentially weather the storm of upfront capital and growing/learning pains.
Also as I understand it valve doesn’t hire developers that don’t have a minimum of 15 years in industry related employment so if valve maintains its current hiring standards (and I’m not completely wrong or it has already changed), they VERY easily could poach all the experience they would need to since they would have the time. Might be a very exciting and enthralling opportunity to work for a gamer/pc focused fab.
I mean I doubt it but if they were thinking long term it would given them a comfortable time frame to do it in.
If turns out they already have the capital to self finance it all that wouldn’t entirely surprise me they could.
eldebryn@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Even if it worked it wouldn’t. Neoliberals and free-market advocates will tell you that competitors would rise up if there were no regulations.
But some industries (like silicon and microchips and other advanced tech) are just impossible to breakthrough without years or decades of setting up and operating without profit vs current players.
And those current players, given no market regulations, will still use their money to do anything possible to stifle upcoming competitors or buy them out.
The dream of capitalism was born pre industrial age, under models of “apples sold at the farmers’ market”.
The reality is we have advanced a lot and need mixed economies to keep things fair for most people.
AliOski@feddit.nl 2 days ago
I’m sorry, but capitalism didn’t really exist up until industrialism. Before then, it was mainly feudalism.
Methio@jlai.lu 2 days ago
Prices going down from competitors is a capitalism lie which occurs sometimes.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
CXMT is our best bet. But it takes time to ramp up production. Some article I saw said they’re building things at a quicker pace than other manufacturers typically do which is a good sign.
But when demand slumps back down then now you’re stuck with all this manufacturing capacity that’s not useful anymore. So you have to balance dealing with short term spikes vs long term demand.