If others end up making denser cells and Micron can't they will genuinely be behind. 6/4=1.5. It is not a small improvement.
I think this is definitely the "interest rates are high, dropping research and just pushing out what we already makes gives us a higher valuation" type thing which can kill companies.
It's a public company that is beholden to the shareholders. They have to explain what they are doing. But I agree with you, seems sus. Even if you can make more money by scaling the old tech today, that does not justify dropping the future innovation. Especially because by all accounts they are swimming in cash... Unless they are telling the truth and 4f extra complexity does not justify extra cost. I really have no context to evaluate that.
Or in short: "let others figure out the technical complexities and surrounding economics." - Which would make sense from a company that believes they can catch up once the expensive leg of the manufacturing/scaling research has been completed. Whether that bet is good or not, we'll see.
0: Didn't we read a few days ago here that all of 2027 production capacity has been sold out already?
In layperson DRAM-speak this translates to the following: rowhammer attacks are mitigated at the hardware level by increasing the size of and spacing between adjacent cells. At some point further feature size scaling makes it no longer be possible to produce 4F cells that are sufficiently robust against rowhammer type attacks to meet Micron's internal reliability targets. This would be akin to when Intel hit the power wall with the Pentium 4 in the early '00s forcing a change in engineering direction away from merely scaling clock speed.
With Micron's insight into the DRAM order pipeline, management likely has to factor in the chance of oversupply in the next couple of years as significant, which makes the shift in direction even more sensible. DRAM price crashes are a regular occurrence in the industry which lead to anti-dumping tariffs and legal battle in the 1990s (as well as Intel's shift away from DRAM towards complex logic devices in 1985). I'm pretty sure Micron's management is consciously working to avoid a repeat of that protracted legal battle.
I'd rather have an engineering problem over a legal problem any day of the week.
The article mentions CXMT has committed to 4F^2 server RDIMMs by end of 2026, and a linked article mentions that CXMT has halved the fab build time from the industry-standard 2 years to just 1. How would Micron catch up with that?
The memory triopoly is in the midst of a slow motion wreck because pumping the brakes will reduce profits; the incumbents are going to have their butts handed to them by CXMT in 2-5 years, and they'll all act like they didn't see it coming as they are bailed-out by the US or SK government, for "National Security."
Looks like they have mapped the possible paths and consider it a dead end. The density increase is low compared to the effort to process cost, so they just opted for a simpler process with a similar density at a much lower cost per wafer. They might come back to it at some point - they invented it and have substantial IP investment on it.
Also, there might be some cost of opportunity - the AI bubble is now, so anything that diverts from current extremely profitable product lines is a terrible idea. It’s a bubble and they have the fiduciary duty to suck it until it’s dry.
They really don't. A public company doesn't even have to provide forward-looking earnings guidance, though many choose to do so for strategic reasons. The only reason to make announcements is if there's some strategic benefit to doing so.
I suspect it is because Micron is a publicly traded company, its management has to answer questions from the investor community.
And because DRAM is a commodity business, profits in the long term are possible even if a company does not win first-to-market profits.
Finally, there is always a market segment that is not betting on the new technology when it is new.
This is not unlike the strategy the US employed to win the space race after they were quite behind in said race. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off! (I'm not confident since I don't find the CEO to be anything more than a margin chaser).