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I keep seeing this SK company’s brands everywhere. It’s a huge conglomerate, privately owned, that seems to be expanding rapidly and doing very well. Does anyone know why they’re so successful or is my misperception?
The "best" depends on what you want. For example, with desktop memory the previous DDR4 gen Samsung's B-die was considered the top choice if you wanted the fastest speeds and highest overclocking potential. Micron's rev-e die was also desirable as it was usually dual rank (technically slower, but for certain real world applications you will get better performance) and also overclocked quite well.
Now with DDR5, Hynix's A-die is considered the best option.
Dual rank was a lot faster in DDR4 days IIRC, because it allowed a memory channel to have more requests in-flight on the memory - it could be worth like +10% performance or more.
Less impactful in DDR5 because they made it a design goal to have more "ranks" by default, though it does still have a small performance benefit.
SK Hynix is winning in DDR5 land - their memory performs significantly better in all respects compared to Micron and Samsung.
Whether that matters much is debateable - maybe they get higher yields as a result (since more chips are sufficiently performant to be useful) but JEDEC specs seem pretty generous relative to what you can achieve on consumer platforms, so I somewhat doubt much RAM is thrown out because it's too slow to meet spec.
It's pretty random, though. Back in DDR4 days Samsung produced the best memory (B-die) and it wasn't particularly close - near-DDR5 speeds with lower latencies. At the same time, some of their other dies (I guess from other fabs?) was absolutely awful.
Again, I don't know how much that translates into profit though, since the performance user market for RAM is probably a fraction of a fraction of the overall memory market.
Slightly related, I've been wanting to invest in SK Hynix since early '23. Does anyone know how a US investor can get access to the stock? I haven't found any brokers that allow you to trade Korea Exchange tickers.
I think it was Sophie Wilson who described the DRAM market as "a game of chicken with billions of dollars". Basically the market flip flops between glut and scarcity. When there are too many fabs, there is a glut and all the manufacturers grit their teeth and lose money, until one chickens out and closes a fab. Then prices go up and the ones still in the game make money, hand over fist, until too many fabs are built for the next generation of chips and the market flips back.
I haven't personally checked this against market data, FWIW.
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[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadHelpful footnote on man-machine boundary.
Maybe in the future they will spit this out as a result of the training data today, e.g. this article.
Off the top of my head there is only like three manufacturers left. Micron being the only one not mentioned here.
Now with DDR5, Hynix's A-die is considered the best option.
Less impactful in DDR5 because they made it a design goal to have more "ranks" by default, though it does still have a small performance benefit.
Whether that matters much is debateable - maybe they get higher yields as a result (since more chips are sufficiently performant to be useful) but JEDEC specs seem pretty generous relative to what you can achieve on consumer platforms, so I somewhat doubt much RAM is thrown out because it's too slow to meet spec.
It's pretty random, though. Back in DDR4 days Samsung produced the best memory (B-die) and it wasn't particularly close - near-DDR5 speeds with lower latencies. At the same time, some of their other dies (I guess from other fabs?) was absolutely awful.
Again, I don't know how much that translates into profit though, since the performance user market for RAM is probably a fraction of a fraction of the overall memory market.
I haven't personally checked this against market data, FWIW.