alt Hacker NewsOne unit of HBM capacity consumes roughly the wafer capacity that could have produced three units of DDR5 capacity. HBM dies need to be larger than ordinary DRAM dies because of how the final packaging works.
> As discussed previously, the ramp of HBM production will constrain industry supply growth in non-HBM products. Industrywide, HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given number of bits in the same technology node. With increased performance and packaging complexity, across the industry, we expect this trade ratio for HBM4 to be even higher than the trade ratio for HBM3E. We anticipate strong HBM demand due to AI, combined with increasing silicon intensity of the HBM roadmap, to contribute to tight supply conditions for DRAM across all end markets. As the memory industry is still recovering from the challenging environment in 2023, this tight supply environment will help drive the considerable improvements in profitability and ROI (return on investment) that are needed to enable the investments required to support future growth.
https://investors.micron.com/static-files/4550f98c-1054-4847...
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> HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given number of bits in the same technology node
That's really interesting, and I wonder why? I believe HBM has redundant ECC bits by default, which would add a few %, but other than that, is it just that the yield is much lower due to die stacking? Of course, this is a 2024 document so things may have changed a bit since.
>As the memory industry is still recovering from the challenging environment in 2023, this tight supply environment will help drive the considerable improvements in profitability and ROI (return on investment) that are needed to enable the investments required to support future growth.
The problem is that they need actual chips tomorrow. I fear we are reaching the point in the semiconductor industry where, in order to sustain the revenue growth propping up their valuations, they're going to have to start selling future chips that cannot possibly be physically produced.