Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Begins Testing Controversial Chinese Memory Chips

CWallace said:
Apple just announced up to $30 billion worth of investment in Broadcom to design and manufacture chips for them, and this follows Apple and Samsung signing a deal on chip production at Samsung's Austin, Texas fab.


Since the chips will be used only in domestic Chinese market products to start, Chinese consumers would be the only ones to see pricing relief, I imagine.
Click to expand...

Memory chips, much like oil is a global commodity. It trades internationally 24/7 on open markets just like any other commodity.

So, if more chips are available for the Chinese market, that leaves production capacity and supplies to flow to other markets. So theoretically it should stabilize prices globally. Of course, someone is always out to make a buck, so don't count on it.

As far as chips that are made by a company with ties to the Chinese military, well I get the restriction. The PRC is not an ally of the US. They are international rivals and to allow computer products with ties to a rival's military into devices that may handle classified or higher information is simply unacceptable.

You can test, vet, and verify all you want. It's the very nature of intelligence organizations to figure out how to circumvent such validations. The only winning move is not to play and exclude these products from devices approved for handling classified information.

And it's not xenophobia or anti Chinese sentiment. Taiwan is full of ethnically Chinese people and similar restrictions aren't in place there. It's about the regime and not the people.
 
  • Love
Reactions: Andy_2341
anthonylambert said:
it's only recently Apple were selling an 8gb Mac now 96gb and 128gb is quite common for PC's. These factors together.

Something the new guy has to be all over. It already looks like Macs have been held back due to lack of ram.....
Click to expand...
Not the main topic of the thread, but Mac's still come with 8gb in the form of the Neo, and it depends on what you do as to if that holds you back. Many of the Neos run just fine for their customer base, but wouldn't for someone who uses 96gb on their PC.
 
I wasn't really sure about whether AI was just a bubble. I started thinking about the insane amount of money they are spending and planning to spend - talks of building nuclear power plants, etc. I then thought about how they sell $20/mo subscriptions. Then, I thought about how few people I know that are willing to even spend $20/mo on it. I believe they have hired some very creative people to make the numbers work.
 
  • Like
Reactions: hovscorpion12
VulchR said:
For multiple reasons the US must invest in a domestic chip-making industry rather than relying on the PRC.
Click to expand...
Yeah, and it takes years (if not decades) to build. Micron started building fabs 3-4 years ago after the CHIPS act and if we're lucky, they'll come online later this year or next in low volume production, and may well take years to ramp to full.

More complex fabs (SoCs, GPUs, etc) take even longer (see the TSMC fabs outside Phoenix, even Intel's own Fab 42, etc). Just one bring up example: the water in the sonoran desert is just different than Taiwan, so TSMC had to take months longer on just one step to properly adjust manufacturing processes, etc for just wafer wash waster supply. Think about that across 1000s of steps, 1000s of variables.

You don't just build a fab like you build an Amazon warehouse.
 
  • Like
Reactions: conmee and Populus
hovscorpion12 said:
Then explain the +$1,000 overnight

Both screenshots were taken yesterday
Click to expand...

John Gruber priced out the same configuration in the online US Apple Store on 25 June when Apple announced their price hike and it was $10149, which matches the $1000 higher price you are reporting.

So I wonder if your $9199 price was a mistake that Apple subsequently corrected, or perhaps Apple was running a special deal that day. 😛
 
Last edited:
Cook just loves his State run Chinese companies Anything to increase margins, eh?
Hope Trump lands a huge sanctions on this
 
963852741 said:
That's patently false. Back in the day you could buy any RAM you wanted (correct specification) and upgrade your iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, MacBook/Pro or XServe.
Click to expand...
Yes, you're right, I meant official Apple-supplied RAM and probably could've been more specific. I always bought the lowest spec of RAM from Apple and bought third party SO-DIMM to throw in it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 963852741
What gets me about the massive size of the AI buildout is that rapid changes in software combined with new, more dedicated AI hardware designs that greatly improve performance could obsolete all the hardware going into these AI farms pretty quickly. We're at such an early stage of AI that changes happen more rapidly than after it has matured.
 
  • Like
Reactions: johnsawyercjs and lfaa
Would Apple been this big a company if they had not went to china years ago?
Now it bites them in the butt! USA USA USA!!!!
 
NewOldStock said:
Would Apple been this big a company if they had not went to china years ago?
Now it bites them in the butt! USA USA USA!!!!
Click to expand...
How has their use of Chinese manufacturing hurt Apple? It is true that they need to spread their manufacturing around to other countries for capacity, access to markets and risk management but going to China to get that started seemed to work out well for them.
 
anthonylambert said:
Apple are partly to blame for the chip shortage. Getting deals on previous chips priced to the bone meant that the chip firms didn't have money to invest in new plants. Memory use has expanded massively. it's only recently Apple were selling an 8gb Mac now 96gb and 128gb is quite common for PC's. These factors together.

Apple should build/buy a memory FAB, they are too exposed. Apple have left themselves vulnerable.

Something the new guy has to be all over. It already looks like Macs have been held back due to lack of ram.....

I would have thought Tim would have seen this coming?
Click to expand...
Even if Apple and other DRAM purchasers hadn't been so cutthroat with the DRAM manufacturers in 2023, and this had given the "Big Three" manufacurers enough money to build two or three extra mega-fabs, those factories wouldn't be producing consumer RAM today anyway. Because HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory) sells at a 70%+ profit margin compared to the very thin margins of consumer PC RAM, memory executives would have immediately stuffed those hypothetical new factories with specialized HBM-manufacturing equipment that would use even more silicon waferage for HBM. They would still be selling 100% of that capacity to Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google. The consumer market would still be starving for standard DRAM because currently a wafer used to make DRAM for a laptop or desktop computer is a wafer wasted in the eyes of a chipmaker's shareholders.

The average consumer buying a 16GB Mac or a 32GB PC, or one with the higher RAM configurations you cite, provides RAM manufacturers with a profit level that's now a drop in the bucket compared to what they make selling HBM RAM to companies making AI data centers. A single AI server cluster requires terabytes of HBM, and because HBM requires stacking chips vertically, it physically consumes 3 to 4 times the raw silicon wafer space of standard consumer RAM. The current DRAM shortage isn't because people have been buying computers recently with more RAM, or even because RAM manufacturers didn't build more manufacturing capacity for them to keep up with that demand. It's because AI data centers are devouring 20% to 25% of the entire world's raw silicon wafer output.

Building a cutting-edge memory fabrication plant takes 2 to 3 years and costs upwards of $20 billion per facility, and you need a massive, global network of them to achieve economies of scale. And RAM manufacturing isn't Apple's part of Apple's business anyway. They don't even make their own A-series or M-series processors, and instead they outsource that to TSMC.

If Apple sunk $100 billion into building a global memory foundry network just to supply its own devices, it would significantly deflate its corporate margins, and we know shareholders don't like that.

Tim Cook did see this coming. His solution hasn't been to build a RAM factory, but to use Apple's geopolitical leverage to qualify alternative Chinese memory suppliers like CXMT to try to break the Western memory cartel's pricing chokehold.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back