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Discussing DRAM Shortages w/ Memory & Foundry Executive (Guest Telegrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-12-05 02:31:32
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The next episode of Broken Silicon will see us be joined by Dave Eggleston once again! You know what, I'll let his bio on LinkedIn do the talking - Dave is a:

"Seasoned memory industry executive, with 25+ years of engineering, marketing, and strategy leadership at major companies (GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Micron, Sandisk, Rambus), start-ups (Unity Semiconductor, NVMdurance), and consulting (Intuitive Cognition)."

^So there you go! This guy is an EXPERT when it comes to DRAM manufacturing - ask him anything having to do with SSDs, DRAM, or the future of Memory! You have ~36 hours to submit below!

Last Time Dave was on: https://youtu.be/qWbilWAOhVo?si=Sn5mXniY9vXgZ5wl

Check out Dave's Career on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deggleston/

Comments

magneticmanul

Hardware shortages seem more frequent and severe than decades past. Does the DIY market stand a chance in the long term, or will all the expensive factory capacity be reserved only for the huge customers like Dell that book multi-year supply contracts?

Timo H

Very few dram chip manufacturers and nand manufacturers are around... can they even merge or go bust with this new situation like in 80s and 90s constantly happened?

transpose1195

I recall reading about the boom and bust nature of the memory market in the glory days of Tom's Hardware and Anandtech 20 years ago. What makes the industry so cyclical and have those forces changed over the years? How do memory producers try to shield themselves from the volatility?

MelodicArmor

Welcome back Dave! It has been awhile. DDR5 has impressed me overall as a technology. It feels like the timeline between when it first launched to when higher end kits become available was short. Have you ever seen a generation of DRAM where the technology improved at a rapid pace in such a short period of time? What generation of DRAM excited you most over the years?

MelodicArmor

When I first heard about the wafer deals OpenAi secured with SK Hynix and Samsung, I was literally trying to pick my jaw off the floor. I am still baffled on how OpenAi pulled off this fiasco. How would it been possible for them to get 2 separate deals without either Samsung or SK Hynix knowing about the other deal until after the ink has dried?

Cleansweep

What are the market forces that would convince Micron to completely shutdown Crucial, as opposed to a temporary shifting of product to B2B sales for the duration of heightened demand?

Jay Buffay (Yes I Know It's Spelled Wrong)

Hello :) I have two questions: 1. In the previous episode, it was discussed that dram prices are partially inflated by companies not being allowed to sell older machines to the chinese market. Are there any other secondary markets that might take these machines to relieve pressure on the lower end marked. 2. The whole ram shortage has made me remember the promises of intel optane: almost ram like speeds and latency in a non-volatile package, with Wendel from level one tech lamenting that the technology never had the chance to come into it's own through higher bandwidth interconnect like pcie 5 and up. Seems it would have perfect for ai applications at 5.0x16 speeds... I remember that Pat sold off the rights/research to Micron who was manufacturing it. Do you think this shortage will see the return of 3d xpoint, or any other flash / dram alternatives? Thank you Dave! 😊

MinG3825

Hi Tom and Dave, Will we ever gonna see ECC becomes mainstream for consumer platforms? IIRC even the DDR5 already have ECC built in, it only works by itself and won't report the error to the OS/ users unlike the one on server platforms. What's stopping AMD/ Intel and the ram manufacturers to implement actual ECC on all products especially they already have some kind of ECC for the DDR5 already? What pros and cons will it brings other than data integrities if the server grade ECC is brought to mainstream platform? Cheers!

Intel FanBoy

So far the news has been focusing on DRAM pricing recently I’m wondering should we start to worry about SSDs and NAND pricing next? Do you happen to know how healthy the supply is for NAND in the near future?

Planet 9

Hi, Increasing dram manufacturing capacity is going to take a lot of time and money. Once the capacity is transitioned and the market is cooled off; what do you think will have changed the landscape of products available and their relative prices?

KarbinCry

2026 - SK Hynix puts 2 new fabs to full production (one is in bring up right now) 2027 - Micron opens a fab; SK Hynix opens a fab (first in their fab supercluster project) 2028 - Micron opens another fab; Samsung reopens a fab after extensive rebuild; SKH probably another fab in their supercluster 2029 - Micron opens their New York fab (first module, but in capacity, a new full fab); SKH probably another fab in their supercluster 2030 - Micron opens second module in New York And there is construction being prepared or even ongoing on projects looking even further. Yet recent articles like PCGamer's "Memory crisis and sky-high DRAM prices could run past 2028 as Samsung and SK Hynix opt to 'minimize the risk of oversupply'" (just an example, there are many) are whipping people into a frenzy over evil DRAM barons refusing to expand. Is the industry not already expanding at a break neck pace? Is there even enough tool production to sustain a more rapid build out?

KarbinCry

I see a lot of end consumers complaining. Why do people still not realize how little the end consumer matters? Computers have been the driving force of productivity increase for half a century now. In other words, chips are the underlying economic motor of the current economy. Something so fundamental, so key, so deeply embedded will naturally eschew end consumers. If we were the important customers, then, a) chips would be way worse and way more expensive (less money for R&D - we would be maybe at single digit micron nodes now?) and b) the entire economy would suffer, meaning we would have less money to spend on those more expensive, worse chips. Sure, we get crumbs from the table. But I do not see an argument for how that isn't the best outcome possible.

Tom M

Given Dave's experience at Rambus post acquisition, was the atmosphere at the company as toxic as one may expect given its controversies? Were the staff self-aware of the contempt they generated? Does Dave have an opinion on patent trolling in general and if reforms are needed, etc.?

coltmarshmallow

Just a quick one from me. Obviously for consumer the dram news is pretty devastating What does certain other industries considerations look like? Things like automative or military I can't imagine Ukraine being happy or Germany/Japan with their cars that's all have tech in them now

Dark Side of the Force

It seems like direct consumer ram price has gone straight up... When do you think people would see similar increases in more consumer product (phones, tablet, Smart TV, etc)....? What do you think is the extend to the effect of it? Would we see complete supply disruption (no products) or somehow manufacture would try to keep it going but at increadibly inflated price?

Dylan M

With the death of Optane, could you see a future for persistant memory?

Dylan M

With the death of Optane, could you see a future for persistant memory?

Benjamin Cannon

Do you think that GloFlo stopping 7nm and EUV development was the right long term move?

Prior is the theme 999

With micron leaving direct to consumer, who do you see filling the void?

Prior is the theme 999

Could TSMC or especially Intel with their unfilled capacity switch to making memory wafers for direct to consumer seeing the rise in demand? Or is making memory and logic wafers too different to essentially switch on a dime?

Prior is the theme 999

3 years or so into AI and it’s left a wake of victims: energy, water, and hardware which now includes ram. What do you think will be next? Capacitors? PCB’s? Or some other thing no one knows about but will notice when it’s gone.

Prior is the theme 999

Do we need a new GLOBAL chips act? It’s clear just manufacturing more CPU’s and GPU’s isn’t enough but making it to where a company can’t just buy up so much supply of one hardware component. That should be criminal.

Nicholas Buckner

Do different countries need a "strategic RAM reserve" similar to a "strategic oil reserve", at the government or joint venture or company level to help smooth out boom and bust cycles?

Kiln God

I've always noticed when the economy is marginal to improving there seems to be regular memory shortages causing price spikes. Is this time different?

Vincent Hugon

Hi Tom and guest, just a thought : could OpenAI disrupting the RAM market with these huge contracts be construed as a counterplay to Google's new Gemini model, which I hear is supposed to be better than Chatgpt age is using their own tensor chips rather than Nvidia GPUs ? Sort of, depriving a competitor using a different technological stack of access to a fundamental component such as RAM to cut them off at the knees ?