SK hynix dethrones Samsung as world’s top DRAM maker
(koreajoongangdaily.joins.com)186 points by ksec 6 days ago
186 points by ksec 6 days ago
That is correct. Even when we are only left with three DRAM foundry, all three were watching out whether one of them will build a new Fab. That has created an environment where no one wants to build it first unless they are absolutely sure, and when one will be built all other follows.
And that is the reason why TSMC said they will never go into the DRAM business.
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?
Korean conglomerates are focused on hard sciences and there is very little room to do anything else that's why they excel here. They hire from the best Ivy style schools in Korea and focus on cutting edge stuff or improving cutting edge manufacturing
Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates dont create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.
There is also to say that Chaebols (i.e. Korean conglomerates) can do basically whatever they want because the Korean government will bail them out/give them the financial support they need.
With this, the "I need to be extremely profitable" burden is somewhat lifted, giving them the freedom to do hard R&D.
And it is true now still, with the last bribery in exchange of favors dating back to 2018 [1]
[1] https://bruinpoliticalreview.org/articles?post-slug=south-ko...
> Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates don't create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.
What? Korea's software jobs per capita is one of the highest of all wealthy (let's say top 30 HDI) countries. Please stop claiming this sort of stuff without being familiar with the country.
They've been around in one form or another since the early 80s, and have been in and out of a few of the major chaebols in that time. I wouldn't call them privately owned in the western sense, necessarily. There's no institutional investment behind the chaebols themselves generally, they're 'owned' by a single family and passed down hereditarily, and are nationalistic in a certain sense; they're much more closely ingrained with both government and state identity than most western corps.
As others have noted, SK is not private - although it's hard to say whether it's private or public as it's more of group of companies. But many of larger companies including Holding Co is private. The company in this article's context is SK Hynix which is second largest (or third?) on Korean exchange. Just like other conglomerates in this country, SK Group runs many other businesses including bio, finance, telecom, etc.
I think SK Hynix's NAND business may have already been bigger than Intel's NAND business when they made that acquisition. Certainly by then SK Hynix had recovered from being late to the 3D NAND transition, while Intel was on a worse technological trajectory with their roadmap that diverged from the rest of the industry.
Your impression that they were at all new to the SSD market is largely due to the fact that SK Hynix operated mainly as a component supplier, and has never pursued promotion of their own retail SSD brand the way Samsung does. Hynix was a major player in the NAND industry before the SSD market as we know it even existed, and has been a major supplier of SSDs to PC OEMs for as long as PC OEMs have been buying SSDs in large volumes.
Aren’t all South Korean conglomerates like that? Samsung, SK, LG, Lotte, … they have shocking broad business lines even if you just know them for something more narrow.
SK Group is one of the big Korean chaebols. An important thing to understand when looking at South Korean politics and economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Group
Note that "SK" does not stand for "South Korea", as one might be lead to believe.
Hasn't this been a common trope for past ~50 years? East Asian anything is at least within a few miles to American/European anything, but way cheaper thanks to USD dominance, and that situation renders non-Asian industrial fabrication pointless and unsustainable, and East Asian products win.
From Toyota cars to Sony TVs to TSMC chips to DJI drones. It's been that way for a while.
So who makes the best ram? or is it largely interchangeable.
Off the top of my head there is only like three manufacturers left. Micron being the only one not mentioned here.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the only three manufacturers doing leading-edge DRAM manufacturing, but there are other companies like Nanya that do older DRAM types and specialized DRAM parts for eg. embedded and industrial applications rather than PC, servers, and phones.
As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next, and also depends on what you consider "best": you might be looking for chips that overclock well in a desktop, or that are least likely to suffer compatibility issues and performance loss when maxing out the capacity in a desktop, or maybe "best" might mean who has the lowest-power LPDDR for your phone.
The DRAM parts made by the big three largely all adhere to the same standards (thought not necessarily all supporting the same frequencies), with the most significant recent example being GDDR6X that was essentially a NVIDIA-Micron exclusive partnership. For the most part, it's the latest iteration of DDR (desktops and servers), LPDDR (handhelds and low-power laptops), GDDR (GPUs), and HBM (more expensive GPUs).
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.
My sibling comment has a lot of good info, but to answer your question for ddr5, SK Hynix makes the ram capable of the highest frequencies/best timings, Samsung is second and micron is third. At least this was true when ddr5 initially came out, these things could change. Its also worth mentioning that manufactures can have different grades/product lines so there is variation within a manufacturer to. My perception is that Micron and Samsung are cheaper than SK Hynix, though idk what wholesale prices actually look like.
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.
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.
Interactive Brokers lets you trade HY9H and HXSCL which are secondary listings of SK Hynix on German and US exchanges respectively.
I still reserve a couple every month. I live 2 blocks away
64GB is what you need to run some decent quantized mid-sized LLMs locally…with unified memory on Apple silicon. Should be standard, that would open up a lot if new applications. Incidentally, even high DPI monitors aren’t standard yet for non-mobile devices. Sad how slowly things move.
Are there aggregations of some accessible telemetry from a widely used application that reveal what is most common today?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho
The Steam Hardware Survey is an incredibly valuable resource, what with it being freely-available, constantly updated, and sourced from a population that makes its sampling biases generally easy to identify and understand. It and the Backblaze hard drive data are almost unique in how they provide real, large-scale data about computer hardware.
I've had that happen twice!
Recently I asked for my software developer colleage to be bought a 24 GB Macbook Air instead of 16 GB, and boss came back with "not everyone needs a super-big machine like yours Jamie!".
They seriously spent contractor time investigating whether 16 GB was "enough" to get by for our app development, for a price difference on one laptop (second hand) that was negligible compared with cost of my colleage's time.
When I was using 16 GB I regularly had to watch the spinning beachball waiting for tasks due to memory pressure. Between browsers and VMs, it was nowhere near enough for how I worked. So I knew why I was asking, and I knew the price difference was so small for the company, that it was a no-brainer. I gave justifications but it was seen as over-indulgent.
16GB has been the new minimum for under a year. Give it some more time /s
> This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
Helpful footnote on man-machine boundary.
Tangentially: LLMs are really impressive at translation. I guess it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise given where a lot of the most pivotal research came from, but still, the leading edge LLMs are extremely good for situations where having a human translator is infeasible or too expensive, and if you're worried about correctness you can go through and verify the translation using reference material and asking the LLM for more information about a given excerpt, which you can also verify against references and online discussions.
I think my only concern is that I'm not sure how to make sure I'll always have an untainted set of reference material to check against in the post-LLM Internet. We've had LLM hallucinations result in software features. Are we possibly headed towards a world where LLM hallucinations occasionally reshape language and slang?
I feel bad for human translators right now. For various use cases, current-day machine translations and especially LLM translations are sufficient. For those not versed in the world of otaku and video game nerds, one extremely fascinating development of the last few years is the one-shot commission platform Skeb, where people can send various kinds of art commission requests to Japanese artists. They integrate with DeepL to support requests from people who don't speak Japanese fluently, and it seems to generally work very well. (The lower-stakes nature of one-shot art commissions helps a bit here too, but at the least I think communication issues are rarely a huge problem, which is pretty impressive.) And that kicked off before LLMs started to push machine translations even further.
My wife has been working on translation recently, and the LLM hit rate for novels is highly variable. It's capable of just dropping out entire paragraphs. You still need a final pass from a human native speaker editor to check that it makes sense. Which is what's happening in this article, the news site cares enough about their brand and quality to check the output.
I agree that bidirectional communication is probably going to work a lot better, because people are more likely to be alert to the possibility of translation issues and can confirm understanding interactively.
Definitely contextually dependent: things like news articles are probably the gold standard for machine translation, but creative works and particularly dense reading material like novels seem like they will remain a tougher nut to crack for even LLMs. It's not hopeless, but it's definitely way too early for anyone to be firing all of their translators.
> It's capable of just dropping out entire paragraphs.
I suspect, though, that issues like this can be fixed by improving how we interface with the LLM for the purposes of translation. (Closed-loop systems that use full LLMs under the hood but output a translation directly as-if they are just translation models probably already have solved this kind of problem by structuring the prompt carefully and possibly incrementally.)
They are. For unlicensed fan translations of indie Japanese games the word "MTL" used to mean "unplayable translation quality" until maybe a year or two ago. Now ChatGPT can maintain enough context to translate the game mostly correctly. There are still cases when the names flip-flop between two plausible translations (e.g. Rina-Lina or "scroll of wisdom"-"sage scroll") or the gender is not inferred correctly, but they are rare enough that a single editor can crowdsource and apply the fixes. The prose itself is now finally legible and you don't feel like you're reading the clues to a cryptic crossword.
I was watching a graphic novel on YouTube yesterday that was translated from Japanese text into an English narration. It was weird, not perfect, probably copyright infringement, but pretty effective. I think it’s only a matter of time until we have real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling, or heck, working in another country where you don’t speak the local language. Language barriers are going to fall quickly.
The auto-dubbing on youtube has the classic hallmark of an AI product: you can't turn it off easily.
(the audio track switcher, which will give you back the original audio, is not available on mobile. Fortunately if you use newpipe it is ..)
> real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling
These are definitely already a thing, popular in Asian countries. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008777097933.html
It's no doubt possible to have translation with less lag on average than current tools like Google Translate's Conversation Mode, but truly real-time translation is impossible because of word order differences. You can't translate a word you haven't heard yet.
Have you seen Soniox? They support real-time translation (only speech to text translation for now).
(disclaimer: I worked there)
That paragraph itself could be spat out by the LLM too. I’m not saying it is, but it’s a depressing thought.
Maybe in the future they will spit this out as a result of the training data today, e.g. this article.
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.