SK Hynix reports record profits despite DDR4 "shortages"

[Dabombinable]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

I remember having to shell out $6M for a gig stick back in the day... oh wait..

 

 

$6M for a 1 gig room you mean....

[mr moose]

8 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

$6M for a 1 gig room you mean....

did you live in the 80's?  All games were played with sticks my friend. None of them had silicon on them though, we had to use our imagination. 

[asus killer]

When it all started. 

 

"SK Hynix said first-quarter DRAM chip shipments fell 5 percent from October-December while average selling prices rose 24 percent. NAND chip shipments fell 3 percent while the average price rose 15 percent."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sk-hynix-results/sk-hynix-reports-record-quarterly-revenue-profit-on-strong-chip-demand-idUSKBN17R00F

 

 

"Quarter-over-quarter, DRAM bit shipment decreased by 5% but the average selling price increased by 24%."

http://www.4-traders.com/news/SK-Hynix-Reports-First-Quarter-2017-Results--24257223/

 

that may explain what is happening. I were they reducing shipments ?

 

 

[mr moose]

50 minutes ago, asus killer said:

 were they reducing shipments ?

 

 

 

Probably just an unintended reduction in manufacturing output.  5% could be failed silicon, delayed supplies or even a line process failure that took to long to rectify.

 

EDIT: 5% could even be a logistics issue or customs problem.

 

EDIT2: the second article explains it was due to short-supply caused by low inventory level at the beginning of the year and limited supply growth.

[asus killer]

16 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Probably just an unintended reduction in manufacturing output.  5% could be failed silicon, delayed supplies or even a line process failure that took to long to rectify.

 

EDIT: 5% could even be a logistics issue or customs problem.

 

EDIT2: the second article explains it was due to short-supply caused by low inventory level at the beginning of the year and limited supply growth.

But with demand starting to grow shouldn't you be increasing supply to make more money? And they were having financial issues before this. i read that and i'm not selling a conspiracy theory but it's strange.

[Xanadu]

4 minutes ago, asus killer said:

But with demand starting to grow shouldn't you be increasing supply to make more money? And they were having financial issues before this. i read that and i'm not selling a conspiracy theory but it's strange.

In an ideal world where they weren't all switching to 3D NAND at the same time on a new node where machines take up more floor space than the last gen, yes. They're all competitively advancing and converging on the same technologies. Don't buy into the conspiracy theory hype.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, asus killer said:

But with demand starting to grow shouldn't you be increasing supply to make more money? And they were having financial issues before this. i read that and i'm not selling a conspiracy theory but it's strange.

 

If they are already at their physical limit, then to increase supply means to build new factories, which costs $$$$ and I am not sure the demand will perpetuate to justify such an expense.  I would assume (read assume) that if the demand was steady and likely to continue then they would be looking to do this,  however factories like this can take years to build.

 

The other issue is that increasing supply may only alleviate demand issues enough to take the edge off but not maintain healthy profit margins.  See other comment in this thread regarding that.  It's something I am not really educated enough to comment on.  @Notional  made some comments.

[Xanadu]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

 

If they are already at their physical limit, then to increase supply means to build new factories, which costs $$$$ and I am not sure the demand will perpetuate to justify such an expense.  I would assume (read assume) that if the demand was steady and likely to continue then they would be looking to do this,  however factories like this can take years to build.

 

The other issue is that increasing supply may only alleviate demand issues enough to take the edge off but not maintain healthy profit margins.  See other comment in this thread regarding that.  It's something I am not really educated enough to comment on.  @Notional  made some comments.

^ This.

 

It's pretty obvious demand will increase. Big data, smart data, and analytics will be pushing for more and more flash storage to drive bigger, faster databases. Hell we came up with in-memory databases just to squeeze out the last drops of system performance when it came to tuning MongoDB for the New York Stock Exchange. The demand will only keep increasing. It's just how the world works.

[Dabombinable]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

did you live in the 80's?  All games were played with sticks my friend. None of them had silicon on them though, we had to use our imagination. 

When schools in the 80's could still be found with room sized computers.....
And I only had a computer from the late 90's-my mum's 386 DX-40 based machine (still haven't found its original VGA card-but viva la external battery).

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

When schools in the 80's could still be found with room sized computers.....
And I only had a computer from the late 90's-my mum's 386 DX-40 based machine (still haven't found its original VGA card-but viva la external battery).

My school had commodore 64's in the 80's.  2 per two classrooms shared for the grade 4, 5 and 6 classes.

[Sakkura]

11 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Not really. It's at the heart of Z13 and Z14 mainframes, as well as Oracle/Fujitsu mainframes. I think there's close to a Terabyte in each flagship model right now.

 

I didn't say 3DXP is DRAM. It does have a DRAM cache though for the dedicated SSDs. And Optane is definitely not niche. AWS EC2 Gen 5 instances optimised for storage and databases are backed by it at the caching layer.

A few mainframes is still niche. The fact of the matter is that there are three DRAM manufacturers worth talking about.