CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
koreaherald.com261 points by phront 2 days ago
261 points by phront 2 days ago
As a outside observer, NAND and DRAM prices have skyrocket ed with the AI infrastructure boom just as the China-based fabs are coming online.
It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM.
But right now it seems they can max out their supply capacity without selling below cost.
Appears to me like China's endless state led (often unproductive) investment in semiconductor manufacturing subsidies (for decades) is about to pay off with some industry dominance soon.
Like the electric vehicle sector.
It's amazing what can be achieved when you can plan 5 years in advance, instead of just making the line go up for the next quarter.
History is littered with the corpses of those slaughtered by the millions in the name of great leader’s 5 year plans.
That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority.
Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?
If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.
I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible.
There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
UN birth rate projections have also been consistently wrong for the past decades.
I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
>treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.
And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.
A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.
Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc.
That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has if anything pulled them further away from that path. Things like the great firewall have helped him in that effort.