09 April 2023

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the twenty first

As regular readers may recall, I've been skeptical of these announced plans/build-outs of semi-conductor. The higher your capital percentage of the BoM, the harder it is to react, profitably, to lagging demand. Well, boy howdy. Even Samsung has tossed in the towel.
Despite uncertainties that surround Samsung's memory production cuts, market analysts believe that the conglomerate's decision to decrease memory output will impact the market's supply-demand balance, potentially slowing the decline in memory prices in the second quarter.
One might also wonder whether those 2 and 1 nanometer builds will finally become commercial. Recall Uncle Bill's (alleged) view that no one needs more than 640K? It is more true that evermore bigger cpu has led to ever more bloated codebases. Face it: not even OSs are written in assembler any more. So, which is the chicken and which the egg? Does evermore memory lead to more transistor hungry cpu, or is it the ease of running code bloat which drives demand for evermore memory? Only The Shadow Knows.

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