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Building a custom-designed ASIC is much easier than producing state of the art memory chips.

There's a reason why Micron and Nvidia are the crown jewels of American technology right now and for the foreseeable future.

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Nvidia buys the memory it uses on its GPUs, same as all other ASICs.

To give some context, Intel started making DRAM, I think they were actually the company that came up with modern memory techniques. They exited the market and pursued a more lucrative moat with CPUs.

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Nvidia does not make RAM
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That doesn't excuse them from wrecking the market for ordinary person.
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NVIDIA produces memory?
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Fabless AFAIK. And that's the actual problem - drawing up CAD diagrams doesn't help if the factories are fully booked out.
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A state of the art GPU is much harder to design & produce at scale and than an internal ASIC.
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People keep saying stuff like this without understanding what it takes to make RAM. It's one of, if not the most, heavily patented things in the world. The second you dip your toes into those waters the lawsuits begin.

If somehow you get around the patent issues, you're now faced with huge research and development costs, fabs to build, processes to sort out and all of that has very high failure rates.

Last time I checked Micron was the largest patent holder in the world and even for them this is a hard area where they are number 3 in the market.

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RAM chips are not hard to produce compared to many other types of semiconductors; Intel started in the memory game and left because the margins weren't great and they were going to fold. The failure rates on these chips are actually very tolerable; you can have a very bad yield and still have a viable chip due to things like ECC.
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Intel entered the memory space because they partnered with Micron. They left the memory space when Micron pulled out of the partnership.
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Intel started making DRAM in 1970, Micron was founded in 1978.
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Yes, it is difficult, but shafting working class is easy, therefor it is okay.

If the rich decided to buy all drinking water, you would probably be saying that's okay, making water is difficult, shortly before dying.

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