[bogwog]

It's easy to see why your argument is wrong with a simple hypothetical: what if they were still making DDR4 today? Would people still buy it?

The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.

So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.

[revolvingthrow]

Because the market pays less for DDR4 than for HBM (or DDR5), and since HBM is heavily modified, vertically stacked DRAM, it competes for the same raw inputs and fab space than DDR4 used.

If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.

[dcrazy]

> People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware

The question is whether there’s enough meaningful demand for aftermarket DDR4 upgrades to make it worthwhile to a manufacturer to keep producing DDR4 instead of switching to HBM and DDR5.

Micron claimed retail is a rounding error, a market not worth serving. So you’d presumably need to find industrial buyers who would be willing to buy DDR4.

[microgpt]

Basic capitalism logic is that if you think it's stupid, you put your money where your mouth is, set up a DRAM fab, and get rich.

[cassianoleal]

I'll do it. Will you give me the seed money?

[microgpt]

No, basic capitalism logic is that you already have enough money because barriers to competition are low.

[cassianoleal]

lol :D