[esseph]

I suspect Chinese factories will get built first, but quality may take a few years to really nail down.

Basically:

China floods the market with cheaper but less QA'd parts, makes a gazillion dollars, is able to spend said money to fix yields / QA issues and streamline operations, by the time that happens Micron and maybe a few other existing players will have new memory production, and then we'll have a flood of cheap, reliable memory. 4yr, maybe?

[cyost]

They're doing decent enough already for consumer electronics. Corsair is selling 16GB 6000MT/s CL36 DDR5 sticks in China using memory from CXMT: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memo...

[curiousllama]

How long would it take an aggressive company to expand production capacity? I always thought it takes a few years, at minimum, for even established players to stand up new fabs

[amluto]

As far as I can tell, Micron and SK Hynix are using EUV lithography and may be constrained by availability of the equipment, whereas CXMT does not have EUV machines. There were reports that EUV lithography is needed for high yields, but CXMT appears to be proving that wrong.

[magicalhippo]

Micron was dragging its heel on EUV and only got it last year[1].

Seems it's mostly useful for LPDDR modules which are predominantly used in battery-powered devices and to improve margins.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/micron-sampl...

[scheme271]

LPDDR is used by the Nvidia rubin platform. I can see AMD using lpddr as well because it gives you denser memory at the same or reduced power budgets.

[tayo42]

I guess we can't bit these yet. I've been thinking about upgrading my ram for my laptop but it's like half the price of a new laptop lol

[ahartmetz]

It is not a law of nature that Chinese products are lower quality (cf. electric cars) and I don't see why they would go for that. They can just bin what they produce like everyone else and sell their products for what they have been tested to deliver.

[nomel]

But it is a near law that the first to market attempts will fully embraces the deeply engrained culture of 差不多, until market forces beat it out of the product line.

[kdheiwns]

That's no different from the Silicon Valley mindset of cashing out and jumping ship.

[fittingopposite]

What is 差不多?

[decimalenough]

Chabuduo, basically "good enough" (but often not really). Classic essay on the topic:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-a...

[khriss]

Seems very similar to the Indian concept of 'Chalta Hai'!

[bendangelo]

Basically means, “good enough” attitude.

[xeonmc]

Not "good enough", but rather "close enough". Very different connotations.

[fittingopposite]

Close enough in which sense?

[esseph]

This has nothing to do about nationality, it has everything to do with building and running a brand new, highly technical, mass production facility.

[Ekaros]

The west absolutely loves enshitified products. So why not sell them what they want? If they wanted quality they would pay slightly more and do something about it.

[bnolsen]

It's pretty sad it used to not be so bad in the US. This is what happens when ethics and morals are removed from the culture.

[dylan604]

And historical record of the lack of QA coming from Chinese manufacturing

[AngryData]

Because we buy that stuff even without it. And if you make both good and crappy products, why sell the good stuff internationally?

The US did it when it was a bigger steel supplier, good steel was sold domestically, crappy steel was sold elsewhere. If you got crappy steel in Africa at the time you might have thought US steel was garbage with poor QA, but in reality US steel was great and they just shipped the crappy stuff because people still kept buying it.

[epolanski]

China is a gigantic country where one in 6 humans live that either produce directly or indirectly, 70%+ of the world's goods.

It's quite difficult to make general statements at such a gargantuan scale encompassing every single sector.

China has an abundance of terrific QA in electronics and advanced technologies as much as it has an abundance of the opposite, just simply due to its sheer size.

[WarOnPrivacy]

>And historical record of the lack of QA coming from Chinese manufacturing

My endlessly excellent Chinese gear (Dahua cameras, XikeStor switches, etc) doesn't know what you're referring to.

[ssl-3]

Mapping around defects in RAM has been a viable thing for a really long time.

I remember reading about it in Linux contexts decades ago, and these days it's something that Windows does automatically.

When can I expect this flood of cheaper RAM with less QA? I'd like to contribute to the gazillion dollar pile as soon as possible.

[dzhiurgis]

Don't think they'll flood the market. Instead gov will subsidize entire vertical (gpu, memory and power) - you'll just buy deepseek tokens on the cheap, just like EVs, solar and batteries. In return you'll give away your data.