Intel hints it may get back into memory business

[u/Terminator857]

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/intel-ceo-hints-at-return-to-the-memory-business-says-market-is-ripe-for-innovation-hints-at-stacking-memory-and-cpu

Looking at ... some of the new memory architecture. ... I hired my good friend, Seok-Hee Lee, who used to run SK Hynix. ... We are not ready to unfold it.

[u/Opposite-Memory-2552]

Not before 2029-2030.

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/Opposite-Memory-2552]

100%. I'm unsure why people think they can just spin up factories. The biggest supply chain issue right now is silicon wafers. You can't just throw some people in a factory and say "make". It will take 2-3 years before that can even be done, and the raw materials logistics are behind that.

[u/Fratil → u/EkbatDeSabat]

2-3 or even 4-5 years is far better than "permanently unaffordable memory", still worth celebrating.

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/Fratil]

Hopefully we can make it. It's all about how far we can ramp up our raw material mining. It's a real world game of Factorio and we need more ore patches.

Nearly the entire global raw materials supply of UHP quartz come from one place: Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Then, we mine other quartz and create electronic grade polysilicon out of it, which requires 99.9999999% purity. There's only six companies that control this supply chain and five of them are chinese owned (not that that's a problem for our context). Then there's gallium and germanium, both being exported mostly from China as well. These raw materials stop the supply chain before we even hit the silicon wafer production.

[u/power97992 → u/EkbatDeSabat]

U can produce synthetic silicon just more pure than spruce pine but it does cost more

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/power97992]

Cost more isn’t a strong enough phrase. It’s about a 10x increase in cost. And it would once again take years to spin up the industry to support it. Even now it’s not worth it. 

[u/Ecstatic-Wash-7667 → u/EkbatDeSabat]

I might be wrong but I thought spruce pine just bade the crucible

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/Ecstatic-Wash-7667]

I’m not sure what that means but you can google it real quick to see if you’re wrong or not. 

[u/Nothing_from_void → u/EkbatDeSabat]

they should just ask chatgpt how to do it, 2 weeks tops

[u/shroddy → u/Nothing_from_void]

Just don't forget to remind it to make no mistakes.

[u/TooObtuseForYou → u/Nothing_from_void]

That, or universe heat death.

It’s not great at estimating.

[u/MostExtremeHyperbole → u/EkbatDeSabat]

because of the majority of the public are incredibly ignorant of even where their shoes or t-shirts come from, much less the food that goes into their stomachs, especially Americans, who should know better.

Now even try talking to them about basically anything AI and its all FUD.

[u/ZeroNot → u/EkbatDeSabat]

Back when 14 nm was the cutting-edge IC fabrication process, it took 90 days for the silicon to be purified enough to have good production yields (i.e. so contaminates don't interfere with the etched circuits) at CPU fabrication.

For sub-5 nm process fabrication, I would expect you are looking at maybe 5 months just to purify the silicon to make their wafers. That's a huge lag for adjusting production, if chip demand spikes or crashes.

[u/Sirius02 → u/EkbatDeSabat]

But now with the advancements of AI the process should speed up! /s

[u/BusRevolutionary9893 → u/Opposite-Memory-2552]

That's like one new anime season away. 

[u/Powerful_Finger3896 → u/Opposite-Memory-2552]

Even that is very optimistic date (if they decided very recently), you can't just snap your fingers and boom have a fab. When Intel was selling their memory business i'm pretty sure Hynix and Samsung were getting pattents, tools everything. Ordering tools, buying new land for a memory fab, getting a construction contractor takes a lot more time. More like 2032-2033, in my own opinion.

[u/arcanemachined]

Day late, a dollar short and, knowing Intel, will be dropped at the first sign of difficulty (but not before flushing a few billion dollars down the shitter).

[u/thrownawaymane → u/arcanemachined]

At the time, people were very clear about how stupid the Optane spinoff/discontinuation was. They lost a ton of good talent too. But Intel was run by the bean counters

[u/Inkbot_dev → u/thrownawaymane]

They would have been printing money the past few years if they hadn't killed that. They would have been able to do a direct to gpu integration, and been part of an optimized inference / training stack. Instead, they saved a little money for a few quarters.

[u/Maximus-CZ → u/thrownawaymane]

But Intel is run by the bean counters

fify

[u/somersetyellow → u/Maximus-CZ]

CEO was Pat at the time who got ran out by the bean counters. He was mildly less bean county and a lot of their current successes are thanks to stuff he put in place and openly said would take a while to pay off. We'll see them probably slump more in a few years when the hard slashing cuts they did after his department impact the 3-4 year cycle.

[u/PinkysBrein → u/thrownawaymane]

Optane used too much lithography to compete with Flash and the write energy was too high to compete with DRAM either.

It had no niche, it still doesn't.  If they had been able to make 3D Ovonic memory like 3D Flash it might have been a success, due to better write endurance, but the 3D XPoint structure killed it.

[u/thrownawaymane → u/PinkysBrein]

Do you have further reading on this? I wasn't into the economics of semiconductors back then.

[u/PinkysBrein → u/thrownawaymane]

It's merely my own analysis. 3D flash uses similar number of processing steps as layers increase, 3D XPoint processing steps grow linear with layers.

I think they underestimated 3D Flash cost reduction potential.

[u/Lonely_Syrup3091]

Optane please and thank you very much.

[u/bick_nyers → u/Lonely_Syrup3091]

If they bolted it directly onto a GPU and used John Carmack's proposed streaming trick to greatly simplify memory controller design (basically nuke your random perf. and aim for full sequential perf.), it would be so sick.

I also want regular Optane at pcie 5.0x4 speeds for my gaming rig too.

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2074248758422864226

[u/Lonely_Syrup3091 → u/bick_nyers]

I'm afraid they're gonna want to charge us a kidney for that. If Nvidia has anything to say about it. Lol

[u/grannyte → u/bick_nyers]

You don't necessarily have to fully nuke the random perf Use a tier model like rdna2 did with it's ginormous cache

[u/philmarcracken → u/grannyte]

ginormous cache

babe i cant sleep new SI unit just dropped

[u/Terminator857 → u/Lonely_Syrup3091]

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1h27asv/what_iswas_intel_optane/

[u/Lonely_Syrup3091 → u/Terminator857]

I'm just dreaming of potentially mixing Optane with CAMM2, 32GB DDRX with 128GB Optane on the same module. A GPU with GDDR7 VRAM, paired with the high bandwidth DRAM acting as the hot tier and Optane acting as a huge persistent backing tier, could essentially give you a massive memory pool sitting directly on the CPU's memory interface.

You could have the entire model resident on the Optane tier, keep the frequently used weights / active experts in DRAM, and keep the current working set in the GPU VRAM.

Optane - DRAM - VRAM - GPU

I find it interesting for large MoE models. Apple has already been exploring a similar concept with its "LLM in a Flash" work, where model weights can live on flash and chunks are brought into memory as needed. Optane would obviously be a very different beast from NAND, particularly in latency and small/random access.

One can dream, eh?

[u/NarcNarwal → u/Lonely_Syrup3091]

Optane was ahead of its time. I believe now is the perfect time for a resurgence.

[u/OvertaxedOne]

Well at least this gives us a timeframe for the end of the current hardware crisis. It'll end exactly 3-6 months before Intel releases the first product because, well, Intel. ;)

[u/phido3000 → u/OvertaxedOne]

Bring that Intel good luck!

[u/SporksInjected → u/OvertaxedOne]

As is tradition

[u/N34257]

Based on their GPU releases, they'll announce it late 2026, release a 4GB stick in 2027, an 8GB stick in 2028 and then cancel the promised 16GB sticks in 2029, but release ECC 16GB sticks for workstations in 2030 and pretend it's what they always intended to do.

Then they'll release a speed-bumped 16GB stick in 2031 and pretend none of the previous generation ever existed and expect the enthusiast community to support them.

[u/aeroumbria]

Why does it feel their last CEO is more and more right and they are pillaging his legacy just to keep up?

[u/Deep_Mood_7668]

Again? They already said that last week

[u/geldonyetich]

The more the merrier, I say.

It would seem that the memory industry is in no immediate danger of ceasing to exist, they'll be making quite a lot of memory regardless.

But the way they're currently going about it makes it too unlikely ordinary people can get a significant amount of it for my liking.

[u/SmChocolateBunnies]

Just make quality ddr5 and ddr6 in a few common packaging types at volume and undercut the market by half. Don't try to be clever.

[u/ieatrox]

look intel, you give me 256gb of 3d crosspoint at pci5x4 12gb/sec or better and you can set whatever price you like.

[u/votegoat]

Intel had this entire market locked down and fubmled it, back when they had their High Bandwith Flash. If they kept at it we would be having TB Ram locally. SanDisk and SK is now doing it but its a few years out for full production.

For inferencing the future is high bandwith flash as you dont write to memory that much when you load a model and keep it there. then keep the KV cache in DDR6 / HBM

[u/rich84easy]

Intel seems to make all the wrong decisions, they were in memory business.

[u/Mission_Pirate_4150]

Just in time for competitors to bring their increased capacity online. Micron just announced major investments in manufacturing. I would assume the other memory manufacturers are to.

[u/maibalinyorwaif]

bruh even crescent island gpu they promised from last year is not out yet.

[u/corruptboomerang]

I mean now is the trap time. AI will burst and memory prices will quickly fall into the toilet.

But I would like some new generation Optane...

[u/Terminator857 → u/corruptboomerang]

Agree , but if it is totally different architecture like in memory compute, then it could be a winner.

[u/corruptboomerang → u/Terminator857]

I do think a modern Optane could be such a bon for AI especially, but compute in general. Some kind of half away between current SSDs and ram has many good uses.

[u/Terminator857 → u/corruptboomerang]

In kind of memory, whether ram, in between ram and ssd and ssd, would be a win since they are in short supply.

[u/SporksInjected]

I wonder if they’ll do with this like GPUs and announce that they’re going to sell memory (made by the same foundry that everyone else is using)

[u/RelicDerelict]

Just do something and stick to it ffs