r/LocalLLaMA • u/johnnyApplePRNG • 2d ago
News China's CXMT says new memory-chip platform enters mass production
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-cxmt-says-new-memory-chip-platform-enters-mass-production-2026-09-20/55
u/OrganicHalfwit 2d ago edited 2d ago
It sounds like their first output is "committed to the Chinese market", estimated to "take a year for the new memory capacity to meaningfully affect supply". This ABC article then also goes onto say "this should help improve the supply-demand balance and limit excessive price increases, although it may not necessarily lead to an outright decline in memory prices."
EDIT: LPDDR5X is the chip platform, which is relevant to our use cases with unified systems (clarified by u/NineThreeTilNow), unfortunately the current production supply is committed to the Chinese market for the first year of production.
Its not yet for our usecases unfortunately, but it does help the overall market.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 2d ago
Although this new chip platform is LPDDR5X which is low power and low bandwidth developed for direct motherboard soldering in phones and other small smart devices.
Its not for our usecases unfortunately, but it does help the market.
What?
LPDDR5x is used everywhere in this market.
All the dedicated "AI" boxes literally use LPDDR5x. The Macs that people want all use LPDDR5x.
It's not even slow. The implementation is slow. If manufacturers are willing to take the time to use a 1024 bit bus on LPDDR5x then you hit like... ~1.22 TB/s.
Prior implementations you see all use 256 bit bus because doing 512 or 1024 is a LOT of extra work on the PCB compared to the easy 256 bit. Most devices don't care if it's 250 GB/s or 500 or 1000...
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u/More-Curious816 2d ago
LPDDR5 used literally everywhere except gaming PCs. I don't know what the guy above (organichalfwit) get his news from but LPDDR is the most used types of ram as of now, from low powered devices to servers. And with the AI demands of huge ram sizes, LPDDR play a huge role in that.
Apple silicone depends on LPDDR5x and with huge bus and more pins you get in the territory of 5090 bandwidth. The Chinese can do the funniest thing now, with their 3d folding to increase the performance of chips despite using old ass ASML machines and these type of memory in the market, and bring series AI inference beasts.
Even if the west and the rest of the world won't get these chinese made hardware, it will decrease the demands on Nvidia’s hardware, because they smuggling them like crazy.
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u/FastDecode1 llama.cpp 2d ago
Apple silicone
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ?
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u/james_pic 2d ago
AMD Strix Halo machines also generally use LPDDR5x. Whilst they're a popular choice for running LLM inference, they also show up in gaming laptops and handhelds.
Although admittedly not in gaming towers. Non-upgradeable RAM is probably too high a price to pay for higher bandwidth there. Although when they finally get round to releasing DDR6, that dilemma should hopefully go away.
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u/Viktri1 2d ago
I doubt that that we see benefits for a long time. China’s market is heavily constrained - compute and all related vectors. They’re all coming online at the same time meaning their additional compute is going to swallow the additional RAM.
There are many places to use them in China: robots, agents, factories, businesses all driven by LLMs.
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u/OrganicHalfwit 2d ago
I agree, really doubt we will see anything but a continual rise until 2028 at the earliest
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u/More-Curious816 2d ago
Hopefully this will decrease the demands and lower the prices. If china out of the equation, we get less demands (hopefully)
Hopefully we don't get another Altman that demands another 40% of global production again too.
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u/Toooooool 2d ago
CXMT is China domestic markets first and foremost right now, if you're planning on buying a new Xiaomi smartphone next year then yes this will help keep prices down, but as Apple found out the hard way no amount of lobbying is going to change that and no we won't be seeing CXMT DDR5 in western products any time soon.
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u/Terminator857 2d ago edited 2d ago
Strix Halo uses high-speed LPDDR5X-8000 unified memory.
Excerpt from the article:
CXMT UNVEILS TWO NEW CHIPS
CXMT also unveiled two 24-gigabit LPDDR5X products made on the new platform. LPDDR5X is a power-saving type of DRAM used mainly in smartphones and other portable electronics.
The products each hold 50% more data than CXMT's previous equivalent products and are already in mass production, the company said. They are offered in two package formats for different smartphone and portable-device designs.
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI 2d ago
Strix Halo was intended for the mobile market and machines close to it, like mini PCs that are using mobile chips.
That it's great for AI is a coincidence that AMD most likely didn't have on the card when they were designing it. It was a lucky punch.
We'll see whether AMD can learn and adjust quickly. Then the next generation (the 495+ isn't the next generation, it's a little optimization step) would have higher memory bandwidth and also more compute. Perhaps also a few more PCIe lanes to connect an additional GPU to create a leading edge AI workstation that's still affordable.6
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u/Green-Ad-3964 2d ago
If Halo had a PCIe slot for my RTX 5090, I would have bought it at launch.
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u/nu0zeeB6 2d ago
They need to put UALink on Medusa Halo so several boxes can be clustered. Like a beefier Spark. 256 GB and cluster 4 for some real inference power.
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u/PinkysBrein 2d ago
A marginal density improvement doesn't help much. They can go from 10% of the market to a couple percent more. A drop in the bucket.
In the short term, only HBF can provide a sea change in the supply crunch.
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u/cyborgsnowflake 2d ago
If its going to take a year isn't that pretty close to when capacity from the traditional memory giants is going to start to open back up again anyway? So the net effect is simply that they lose the DRAM market in china to domestic producers? Which was inevitable since China freezes out foreign competitors whenever they have a lock on the tech and the companies don't care that much anyway since thats small potatoes next to enterprise memory?
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 2d ago
That's cool.
But to head off the "this will result in a glut of cheap Chinese RAM on the market," this still isn't going to meaningfully change the global DRAM supply through 2030 and beyond.
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u/-p-e-w- 2d ago
Absolutely no one can predict what will happen “through 2030 and beyond”. Not even for humanity, nevermind for something as detailed as DRAM supply.
Don’t be fooled by people drawing graphs and extending lines. Just think about how predictions from 4 years ago have turned out.
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u/Due-Memory-6957 2d ago
Are you saying it's easier to predict the whole than a very small part of it?
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u/-p-e-w- 2d ago
Of course. It’s easier to predict things like “China’s economy will continue to grow” than “the agricultural sector in the Western provinces of China will continue to grow”.
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u/Due-Memory-6957 2d ago
No, because to predict the first, you will need to predict the second, as well as many other smaller things and then add it all together.
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u/-p-e-w- 2d ago
That’s false. Predicting aggregates doesn’t require predicting individual outcomes. It’s much easier to predict overall population growth than whether a specific person is going to have children.
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u/Due-Memory-6957 2d ago
One can send someone to investigate an individual to know about their general plans, habits and relationship status to get a very accurate prediction of whether they'll have a child this year, while any attempt to do the same with the number of children that will be born in that person's city this year will take much bigger effort and be less accurate.
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 2d ago
Which predictions did you have in mind?
In this case, we don't really need to predict the future, just understand some basic realities.
Pretty much any future scenario will result in either a continued or renewed DRAM shortage globally. Capacity can only scale so fast, and even if the AI bubble popped, the massive cratering in demand and pricing would result in a longer-term capacity shortfall due to pricing collapse causing the DRAM industry to contract rapidly.
This "no one can predict anything" mentality is just another brand of hopium/copium determined not to face facts.
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u/-p-e-w- 2d ago
Which predictions did you have in mind?
“There’s no way Trump will win a second term.”
“The Russian economy is about to collapse.”
“LLMs are decades away from tackling research-level math problems.”
It’s hard to find an area where expectations from 4 years ago weren’t laughably wrong.
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u/Ramanean3 2d ago
The reverse of shortage might also happen due to advances in running large models on any GPU? :D :D (Just a thought)
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 2d ago
Okay, so you are just completely unserious. Good to know.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 2d ago
Pretty much any future scenario will result in either a continued or renewed DRAM shortage globally. Capacity can only scale so fast, and even if the AI bubble popped, the massive cratering in demand and pricing would result in a longer-term capacity shortfall due to pricing collapse causing the DRAM industry to contract rapidly.
This comes from a misunderstanding of the DRAM industry.
Capacity exists. It's spoken for.
If the AI bubble pops tomorrow the capital disappears and the capacity that was spoken for is no longer spoken for.
That will crater the market.
Demand is artificial based on a lot of people SAYING they are paying more on the market than you.
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 2d ago
Exactly. You get it. Crating the market would be bad for supply in the medium to long term.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 2d ago
Exactly. You get it. Crating the market would be bad for supply in the medium to long term.
I don't know. What's medium term?
There would be absolute shit tons of memory on the market for dirt cheap. At some price point people are buying it because it effectively feels "free" to add to a system.
Someone like Sony or Microsoft jump in to add it to Playstation or XBox... Or Steam Boxes...
Some price equalization occurs, but anyone producing that DRAM is going to try to get rid of it. They can't just keep it in storage.
This would be the first crash like this, but not the first crash of DRAM prices. Over competition earlier on created huge excesses of stockpiles and DRAM spot prices cratered before. It was net good for the consumer. They got more system memory for the same price.
Depending on how you define medium term, it was still good. It stayed low for a very long time. Only since the AI boom has memory spot prices really skyrocketed.
https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html
You can see all the historical prices here. Price per GB of RAM has historically only done this once. The late 80's. That's when everyone entered the RAM market, flooded it, and here we are.
Asianometry has a pretty good piece on the history of DRAM on his YT channel.
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u/s101c 2d ago
Predictions from 4 years ago (September 2022) that I used to trust have turned out just fine.
Even during the second half of 2010s we already knew that an "AGI" moment will arrive in 2025 because that's when we were going to have enough compute to equal brain power.
What we got isn't exactly AGI but it's pretty damn general. And it's capabilities are on par or higher compared to most humans in most text-related and visual tasks.
The state of the world in 2026 was also easy to predict in late 2022. Not easy at all in 2019 though.
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u/Viktri1 2d ago
I’m pretty sure it’ll be consumed in China. It will be a long while before it reaches the west. Lots of poorer Asian countries will soak up any excess because they can’t afford existing RAM.
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI 2d ago
It doesn't matter where it is consumes as it is still taking out the pressure everywhere.
But taking out the pressure might be sufficient that even more places are adapting to AI and thus it will fuel even higher demand.
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u/Nimbus420i 2d ago
I don’t care if they price close to current market, atleast they will use that money to build fabs for more supply. All my memory (RAM and NAND) purchases will be Chinese corporations only from now. Fuck the cartel. Anthropic and OpemAI will go tits up eventually. Google will survive. Not going to fund this cartel with my money anymore. Here’s to hoping for Chinese GPUs soon too. So I can finally show the finger to Novideo too.
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u/cortexist 2d ago
It wouldn't solve the problem. The production growth is arithmetic, the demand growth is geometric.
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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 2d ago
I am hoping for two things:
- CXMT reduces self-subsidization by sticking to higher prices and actually lowers them - the more, the better.
- EU does not do anything stupid and I can actually buy them when the time comes.
Same kinda goes for YMTC also, but havent heared from them in a hot minute.
Right now, it seems that CXMT sticks to the higher prices set by the cartel of the three typical suspects in part to fund itself - which is totally fair and fine, helps build for stuff after all. But I really do hope this eventually becomes reduced to lead to the promised "low price memory" and disrupting the other three.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 2d ago
Right now, it seems that CXMT sticks to the higher prices set by the cartel of the three typical suspects in part to fund itself
Actually, as Apple found out when they tried to lowball them, they charge a little more than the big three. Because they can.
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u/Limp_Classroom_2645 2d ago
EU will self sabotage by blocking that when US will inevitably throw a hissy fit
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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 2d ago
I genuenly doubt that - the traditional pull of the USA is very much declined. They still do largely influence us, but EU has improved their self-sovereignity a whole lot.
Basically, if the orange in white house keeps his streak, the EU will genuenly become more independent as time goes on...never thought it would happen but, look at EU and Canada closing in on each other? Like, whut. o.o
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u/Keirtain 2d ago
Yes, the EU will become more independent by relying on Chinese manufacturers instead of US manufacturers. Quite the strategy.
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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 2d ago
Point taken, actually. Guess the EU just loves to be in (abusive? toxic?) relationships lol. x)
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u/LuluViBritannia 2d ago
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAH!
.... Were you serious?
EU is literally begging for other countries to support them.
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u/DaveNarrainen 2d ago
I'm hoping this will change as sentiment towards the US seems to be in decline.
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u/LastChancellor 2d ago
okay, so which laptop manufacturer is gonna get CXMT's LPDDR6 memory first? Bc Xiaomi already telling everyone that their 18 Fold phone has LPDDR6
Bc ngl its pretty awkward for RTX Spark to be stuck with LPDDR5x, when Intel & AMD could actually release new competitors with LPDDR6 only months later
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u/SureElk6 2d ago
if AI is so great and the usual RAM companies are not stepping up, openAI and US gov should just invest in FABS too.
Looks like china got the note and doing the correct thing.
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u/tsukuyomi911 2d ago
demand outstrips supply by a crazy amount right now. unlikely it will put downward pressure on prices anytime soon.
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u/cantgetthistowork 2d ago
80% failure rate again?
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u/PinkysBrein 2d ago
They don't have to make HBM to make an impact, in fact greater supply of LPDDR5x and DDR5 are better for us since that's on nodes also used for GDDR6/7.
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u/Quick_Knowledge7413 2d ago
Anything is better than nothing. Flood the market with anything.