This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I know it'd be expensive, but I wonder if it'd be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They've certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
I don't know if there's a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.
Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can't just bomb them into submission... Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.
AsmL is a dutch company...
Also ,i'm not sure if HBM requires the smallest nodes
No need, others vountries ram are emerging. Hope they start to get to techno. Even better if they copied it from US. I think they are at reliable ddr4, testing ddr5.
Manufacturing their own sticks would onlympush the problem to the price of RAM chips.
The resources it takes to start manufacturing modern RAM chips is such that THE ENTIRE FUCKING NATION OF CHINA is finally getting around to it.
I know Valve is a big company, but that's a pretty bite to chew and swallow.
My undiagnosed adhd brain: how difficult can in be
The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:
In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.
Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.
The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it's working correctly.
Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.
Now is the time to do it for anyone that can. So much market share available to whoever gets there first.
Even Tsmc tried to make memory and failed. It's difficult.
I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.
They'd need to source the components outside of the increasingly monopolistic US-alligned group of hardware manufacturers. The only way you end run the Big Three is to go to... CHINA. And we've layered so many sanctions, tariffs, and putative measures on import of Chinese hardware that it would be a fool's errand to bother.
I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
Even if there's an AI crash, the long-term outlook for chip demand only goes up. The problem isn't with the economic demand, it's with the provisioning of capital. For the most part, you need to spend tens - if not hundreds - of billions of dollars to start producing even the middle tier of nano-computing components in modern use.
I might suggest there's another way to tackle this problem. And it's one that Valve already is heavily invested in.
Lower resolution games. Lower hardware requirements. More efficient software engines. More games focused on the mechanics and story than the raw, realistic visuals.
You can run Doom on a pregnancy test and people still buy that game. Games like "Undertale" and "Vampire Survivors" do incredibly well in part because they are so accessible to anyone with a 15-year-old rig. Rather than trying to build a PS5-killer machine, you can go the Nintendo route and build a novel interface that runs on more basic components. Then you exploit the hell out of your Disney-esque IP without worrying that Halo: Remastered Delux Ultra looks better than the next iteration of Metroid Prime.
I don't know if there's a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
My understanding is that it’s the latter. AFAIK it takes something like 3-5 years to get a fab going if you already know what you’re doing, so it would not only be wildly expensive but you’re also gambling that RAM won’t come back down to a reasonable supply/demand in the next 5-10 years to break even on the whole process.
There’s also the fact that it wouldn’t really make sense for Valve unless they wanted to make a huge pivot in their whole business. Entry costs aside, manufacturing RAM is not really something a company can just do as a “side gig”. Valve is only like 400 people, so it wouldn’t be Valve just “starting to produce RAM” but rather Valve turning itself into a RAM manufacturer that also distributes video games.
You know i always forget how small valve actually is.
Can't wait to see how negotiations go once the AI bubble pops
They'll just continue with artificial scarcity until they get sued or fined or something but won't be enough to offset the profits
Their dilemma is whether to build more RAM factories, which would reduce prices, or not. Knowing when demand slows down would surely help them.
What's to stop them from just going a generation back and using DDR4 instead of DDR5.
There is no one who can convince me that it makes any noticeable difference anyway. When I was putting together a new/used desktop I specifically looked for DDR4 for precisely that reason and I would take any bet that a performance hit would be measured in numbers too small for any user to even notice.
Constantly needing newer hardware with only fractional improvements is the biggest scam in tech. They took their lesson from Apple and Samsung.
DDR4 isn’t much cheaper, and wouldn’t stay cheaper at all if demand spiked.
DDR4 prices have come up too. In fact, DDR3 and even DDR2 prices have spiked.
I don't think DDR4 is significantly cheaper. Plus, they would have had to go a CPU generation back too then and I think the AMD CPUs of that generation had way worse integrated graphics, so now you'd need a dedicated GPU as well.
They should also sell it with empty ram slots...
I'm sure a lot of people have a desktop with more ram than it needs that wouldn't mind sacrificing a stick or two for a steam machine in thier lounge, especially of they've switched over from windows 10 to Linux on their desktop...
Depending on your steam machine you get, it might have empty slots. I think one of the interviews said some will have a single stick of 16 and some two sticks of 8 just because the stock for RAM is so dumb they are taking what they can get.
I mean sell it with 0 sticks, but I also just realized it uses SODIMM DDR5, and I don't think many people have that just lying around 😅
I hope China floods the market with cheap RAM and absolutely destroys these scumbag memory companies.
Like they did with EVs in the US?
Republicans would probably make sure that can't happen.
They already preemptively had CXMT on the trade blacklist lol. Only got removed because of the intense shortage.
And you end up with the US getting hosed while the rest of us swim in cheap EVs.
The US would be the only country to suffer in this scenario. The rest of the world would be just fine with using cheaper memory while we shoot ourselves in the foot to spite them.
I'm sure they'll try to ban Chinese memory for "national security reasons" but the differences here are that memory is much easier to smuggle in, and even if not, them flooding other markets would free up more supply of other manufacturers enough that we should see major price drops anyway. They recently tried banning imports of foreign-made routers and that didn't seem to actually work out.
It will take maybe two to three years before China could do that. The cheap Chinese RAM manufacturers are only starting their production.
If they have the capacity to do that they would have already been doing it. Chip production is extremely expensive which is why there's only a few companies doing it.
Ah yes, the law of greed and demand.
