No.30465
And that’s exactly what’s happened. DRAM needs to get more efficient, in order to keep up with the improvements in processors. So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive.
Which leads us to the peculiar economics of the companies that manufacture DRAM: the “memory makers.”
The most important thing to know about memory, beyond the fact that it’s expensive and difficult to make, is that it’s fungible. Processors are bespoke: you can’t swap an Intel chip for an Apple chip. But memory chips are not bespoke. DRAM chips all conform to the same industry-wide standards, so a chip from one memory maker will slot into the same device as a chip from any other. DRAM, in other words, is a commodity.
And that combination—capital-intensive manufacturing plus fungibility—is a punishing combination. Because memory is fungible, the industry is intensely cyclical: the entire history of the DRAM industry is a history of boom-and-bust supercycles. First, strong demand from one sector or another—like Windows PC adoption in the 1990s—drives surging prices and a wave of investment from every player; cumulative overinvestment in an undifferentiated good produces oversupply; and then oversupply leads to collapsing prices.
And because production is so expensive, those down-cycles turn out to be existential: the memory industry is marked by constant wreckage. Intel dominated the memory game in the early 1970s but left in the 1980s, opting to focus on processors. Texas Instruments and IBM, also once major players, left in the 1990s. Germany’s Qimonda collapsed in 2009; Japan’s Elpida, once the world’s third-largest DRAM manufacturer, declared bankruptcy in 2012.
No.30484
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No.30486
I’d previously seen someone enjoying a piece of their fried chicken sitting on a step outside of Westfield, but today chose a Family BBQ Chicken ($14) for my first foray into Jimmy’s arts.
I actually didn’t enjoy this chicken at all. The skin was extremely crispy, which was a good thing, but the rest of it was worse than unexciting. The meat, by and large, was dry, with minimal flavouring applied.
I ended up eating it with some packet gravy that I had lying around in the pantry at home.
For what it’s worth, their raw marinated Tandoori chicken drummettes are quite good.