Remix.run Logo
AnotherGoodName 3 hours ago

It’s fab capacity. Fwiw dram is different enough that fabs are not transferable between dram memory and other usages. It’s nice to think ‘wow if they made the current 10nm dram on the latest 2nm processes it’d be much faster’ but it doesn’t work that way. The specific size is needed for the capacitance. Sram can be made on fabs that make other circuitry since it’s transistor not capacitor based but is less dense.

Dram is just extremely specialised.

DoctorOetker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I know the differences between SRAM, DRAM, ...

I asked for evidence different people keep feeding me opposite stories: one insists its not fab capacity but wafer competition, with a recent article claiming HBM3E takes 3 times as much wafer area per bit than LPDDR5X. Others tell me the complete opposite: its fab capacity, not wafer shortage.

Do we have citable references to ground either set of claims?

sowbug an hour ago | parent [-]

I believe those are two ways of describing the same thing. If you're able to book some fab capacity, that means you get to decide what the fab does with the next wafers in the queue.

From your sibling comment, I think you're interpreting the 3x HBM stat as contributing to making wafers scarce. It's more that the next wafer to be processed in a fab is especially precious, making the opportunity cost larger. The beach sand remains plentiful.