- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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https://wccftech.com/asus-enter-dram-market-next-year-to-tackle-memory-shortages-rumor/ Taiwanese outlet, CNA, has received a statement from ASUS regarding the DRAM rumor and stated that it currently has no plans to invest in a memory wafer fab.
Using what FAB capacity?
The whole reason there is a crisis is that OpenAI pre-purchased a shit-ton of wafers, and you can’t just materialize a bunch more or the FAB capacity to turn them into chips.
FAB
Fab isn’t an initialism, by the way, just an abbreviation of fabrication.
Made in household bathtubs like moonshine
So I genuinely don’t know a thing about the subject, but if there’s a surface level answer you can give me…
Why not? Could they not just open a plant to do exactly that?
The lithography machine (the machine that constructs the silicon chips at the hearts of our devices) is THE most complex piece of tech that exists. If you look up how they work, almost every piece of the tech is operating at the limits of current human capabilty in terms of precision and our understanding of physics.
Going from ordering one, to having one set up and running in a FAB, can take a decade.
You might be able to get older generations of lithographic manufacturing up and running faster, but these things require SERIUS infrastructure around them.
You can’t just set up production in a year or even two.
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Not the same thing.
We’re talking about semiconductor lithography.
Lithography machines operate on nanometer precision and require a clean-room environment that makes the standards of medical facilities look like a joke. The machines required are more like ultra-complex projectors operating at wavelengths of light we had to spend decades figuring out how to even produce, not to mention the optics required to be precise enough to construct chips with features so small you can count the atoms they are made out of. The robotic machinery that moves the silicon wafers around is stone-age tech in comparison, and is used because the environment these machines require can’t handle a human existing in the same room, because just the particles from our breath would introduce problems.
Getting some robotic arms welding and screwing metal and plastic together to assemble a car is nothing in comparison.
There are integrated circuits in a Tesla, but they don’t make them. Remember how the car industry completely imploded back in 2022 during a shortage of the chips used in cars? None of them make them. No car company has their own semiconductor fab.
Almost every tech manufacturer, buys fab manufacturing capacity from TSMC or another big fab maintainer.
Unless they were already building it, not in the next year. Or the one after. These things take longer to construct.
What about converting existing plants to just make different kinds of chips? Does ASUS not already fabricate their own silicon?
No, they are in the electronics manufacturing and assembly business, not in semiconductor fabrication.
That’s what makes the entire rumour ridiculous to me
I could be wrong, but this’d be a first for them.
They make plenty of things, but not the actual silicon chips.
It may depend on your exact definition of whether they make it. I believe there are chips with Asus branding (just like I’m certain there are Lenovo-branded chips, and Asus is an ODM). I suspect they design some chips.
However, Asus does not have their own fabs. At its core, this is where the shortage comes from. They would need to either find or build the additional fab capacity, which is a multi-year project.
