SK Hynix reports record profits despite DDR4 "shortages"

[Notional]

21 minutes ago, Eibe said:

If I assumed price elasticitiy my argument would be right. 

I also refuted elasticity in reality... I don't see your point here...

 

I know you are right, as I know you know what you are talking about, I was trying to make a point against hordes of quotes against me of people who only know "demand and supply" for what concerns economics. I just do not like people throwing arguments against me, after studying economics for almost half of my life time. 

I know what you mean. I didn't get up at 6 o clock on mondays to study Managerial Economics, just to be lectured by some nerd who doesn't understand the basics of economics. Incidentally, that is when I learned to drink coffee too 

[Tsuki]

between the artificial shortage and the price fixing, of course they have record profits.

 

they did it back in 2003 and theyre doing it again.

just waiting for the DoJ and the NDRC to actually take notice

[cj09beira]

3 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Which isn't helped by the faster/up to spec HBM2 being released far later than it was supposed to be. I swear HBM might end up being another case of RDRAM the way its going.

Edit: FYI, RDRAM is the extremely costly stuff that limited a lot of people to no more than 512MB of RAM in the early 2000's due to the sheer expense associated with it.

the biggest limiting factor of hbm is the interposer, by using techniques like the ones intel uses with its emib, it becomes much cheaper 

[Dabombinable]

2 hours ago, cj09beira said:

the biggest limiting factor of hbm is the interposer, by using techniques like the ones intel uses with its emib, it becomes much cheaper 

Still, it took Hynix far too long to deliver HBM at its correct speed. Hence the bandwidth of Fiji and Vega being lower than it was originally supposed to be.

[vanished]

Wow, who would have thought making more product and having your product be in high demand led to higher profit? /s

[Sakkura]

12 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

You have no fucking clue how arguments work do you. "I have no proof but its true"....im sorry but the DDR4 demand spike when phones switched from DDR3 and the factories that were damaged by floods last year alone blow your dumb hypothesis with ZERO support out the window. 

 

 

What floods?

[cj09beira]

12 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Still, it took Hynix far too long to deliver HBM at its correct speed. Hence the bandwidth of Fiji and Vega being lower than it was originally supposed to be.

yes hynix seems to suck at making hbm, but fiji did have the bandwidth it needed (it has full speed hbm),

thats why its good to have multiple companies providing hbm, right now samsung is the best, 

[mynameisjuan]

8 hours ago, Sakkura said:

What floods?

I was thinking of the floods in Thailand that destroyed major factories and caused the main spike in prices, but holy shit that was way back in 2011. I thought that was like 2016.  

[Hugsy Malone]

Its called price fixing

[Bit_Guardian]

17 minutes ago, Hugsy Malone said:

Its called price fixing

It's called "prove it." Demand across the world has gone up immensely in the face of the expanding smartphone market and massive datacenter purchases by IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Joyent in this last year for Skylake Xeon Scalable and Epyc. Meanwhile, manufacturers are completely redoing their foundry strategy and technology stack, which has reduced capacity across both DRAM and NAND. If demand spikes well beyond what production can supply, then you can in fact have record profits, record sales volume, and still have a shortage.

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, mynameisjuan said:

I was thinking of the floods in Thailand that destroyed major factories and caused the main spike in prices, but holy shit that was way back in 2011. I thought that was like 2016.  

Plus that was hard drives. DRAM is mostly made in Korea and Taiwan.

[Dabombinable]

4 hours ago, cj09beira said:

yes hynix seems to suck at making hbm, but fiji did have the bandwidth it needed (it has full speed hbm),

thats why its good to have multiple companies providing hbm, right now samsung is the best, 

It wasn't at the correct clock speed. Bandwidth was far lower than it was supposed to be as a result.

[Bit_Guardian]

6 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

It wasn't at the correct clock speed. Bandwidth was far lower than it was supposed to be as a result.

For HBM1? What planet do you live on?

[Beskamir]

On 25/01/2018 at 5:47 AM, RorzNZ said:

Pageing performance was hit I believe. Don’t quote me on it however. So more RAM = less pageing so more performance.

Well... depends on where your data is being stored. If you're out of ram and have to store stuff on disk then yes more ram means better performance. If you're already storing everything you need in ram, then more ram's not gonna do anything since it's already getting accessed at about 200ns.

 

What would have an effect for data that's already in ram is increasing your cpu's cache. Cache can be accessed within just several cpu cycles but it's also really expensive and absolutely tiny.

[cj09beira]

14 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

It wasn't at the correct clock speed. Bandwidth was far lower than it was supposed to be as a result.

you need to go and recheck your sources, hbm1 was delivered at full speed, only hbm2 had those problems 

[Tellos]

I am starting to think SOME price fixing is goign on. I'd for once hope [though I knwo it wont happen] that if caught doign so these ocmpanies got fined all their profits for two years.  Or half their net worth whichever they planned to do. harsh yes but so far fines in the past havint dented them or made them feel a need to act with consumers not getting shafted. At the very least were I china i'd tell them they will either pay a large [between 500 million to 1 billion dollar] fine every year until prices return to normal. Then if it exceeds 5 years they will pay fines of a billion a month or be banned from China. [a massive market] this woudl I think quickly scare them back into line if they realize governments have no paitence for BS.

[asus killer]

20 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

It's called "prove it." Demand across the world has gone up immensely in the face of the expanding smartphone market and massive datacenter purchases by IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Joyent in this last year for Skylake Xeon Scalable and Epyc. Meanwhile, manufacturers are completely redoing their foundry strategy and technology stack, which has reduced capacity across both DRAM and NAND. If demand spikes well beyond what production can supply, then you can in fact have record profits, record sales volume, and still have a shortage.

they've been caught doing it in the past. And blaming Smartphones does not seem right, they did not increased the rate of growth, it actually decreased. If you also look at the numbers for datacenters it's actually a steady growth for the last couple years, no sudden spike that accounts for this mess.

[AresKrieger]

Member when a 8GB high quality stick cost ~50 bucks

I memeber

[Bit_Guardian]

5 hours ago, asus killer said:

they've been caught doing it in the past. And blaming Smartphones does not seem right, they did not increased the rate of growth, it actually decreased. If you also look at the numbers for datacenters it's actually a steady growth for the last couple years, no sudden spike that accounts for this mess.

They had fewer players then and the market wasn't nearly this competitive.

 

The amount of DREAM going into iPhones quadrupled and the amount going into other flagships went up close to 50%. That offsets the 4% fall in phone sales volume easily.

 

Deceotive. It's growing much faster than ever, and with higher DRAM volume demands Just

 look at the RAM volume offering differences between the M4 and M5 generations on AWS EC2. It's up anywhere from 20% on the M5 Large to 40% on the C5 16x xLarge. You'll see the same pattern in all the cloud provider offerings.

 

You also have the vastly expanded GPU market which is also at a shortage. I mean damn if I were Intel I'd start selling my HBM 2 to AMD and Nvidia since it makes its own.

[Sakkura]

2 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

They had fewer players then and the market wasn't nearly this competitive.

They had more players back then. We're down to just Samsung, Hynix, and Micron now, aside from a few tiny upstarts.

 

The case in the early 2000s concerned 5 major manufacturers.

[Bit_Guardian]

10 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

They had more players back then. We're down to just Samsung, Hynix, and Micron now, aside from a few tiny upstarts.

 

The case in the early 2000s concerned 5 major manufacturers.

Elpida counts? Lol. You're funny. No, we have more actual players today if you include Intel. It just doesn't sell to the mass market. It only builds its own products' embedded memory solutions, HMC, and HBM.

 

[asus killer]

17 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

They had fewer players then and the market wasn't nearly this competitive.

 

The amount of DREAM going into iPhones quadrupled and the amount going into other flagships went up close to 50%. That offsets the 4% fall in phone sales volume easily.

 

Deceotive. It's growing much faster than ever, and with higher DRAM volume demands Just

 look at the RAM volume offering differences between the M4 and M5 generations on AWS EC2. It's up anywhere from 20% on the M5 Large to 40% on the C5 16x xLarge. You'll see the same pattern in all the cloud provider offerings.

 

You also have the vastly expanded GPU market which is also at a shortage. I mean damn if I were Intel I'd start selling my HBM 2 to AMD and Nvidia since it makes its own.

they had more players, not less.

 

I don't think the capacity factors into this, of course a phone today packs more memory capacity than a couple of years ago, so does a tablet or a PC,... but they produce larges sticks of memory also.

[Bit_Guardian]

Just now, asus killer said:

they had more players, not less.

 

I don't think the capacity factors into this, of course a phone today packs more memory capacity than a couple of years ago, so does a tablet or a PC,... but they produce larges sticks of memory also.

No. See above. Elpida and the other flea do not count.

 

The phones use more dies than ever. The larger sticks use more dies too. Ever seen a 128GB DIMM and compared it to an 8GB DIMM of the same generation? Those 128 and now 256GB DIMMs are going into all those new cloud instances. It's how they can configure a uniform datacenter into clusters on the fly.

[Sakkura]

24 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Elpida counts? Lol. You're funny. No, we have more actual players today if you include Intel. It just doesn't sell to the mass market. It only builds its own products' embedded memory solutions, HMC, and HBM.

 

Elpida had a DRAM marketshare of 15.2% the quarter before they were absorbed by Micron.

 

Intel, if they make any DRAM chips at all, fall in the "other" category of DRAM manufacturers, who combine for a 0.7% marketshare as of Q3 2017.

 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271726/global-market-share-held-by-dram-chip-vendors-since-2010/

[Bit_Guardian]

37 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Elpida had a DRAM marketshare of 15.2% the quarter before they were absorbed by Micron.

 

Intel, if they make any DRAM chips at all, fall in the "other" category of DRAM manufacturers, who combine for a 0.7% marketshare as of Q3 2017.

 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271726/global-market-share-held-by-dram-chip-vendors-since-2010/

Marketshare is only measured on the open market. I don't think you remember how many of its own products Intel sells using its own memory, a figure no one bothers to check against the market.