Or moan about loosing the monopoly/price fixing and bring in US DOC to fight in your war for free. They already hate the chinese, they wont need actual proof just a great story to start the war, just like in ZTE case.
When Fairchild apparently hired a guy who stole IP along with him and they made the F8 CPU, the company that the IP was stolen from never recovered. By the time the courts got done with the case the benefits had already been wrung from the IP in Fairchild's favor.
Corporate espionage is a very serious thing and it's not new. It's easy to resort to conspiracy theories but sometimes the conspiracy isn't the one your pet speculation leads you to.
"People are always going to copy you. Always. That's why you need to stay one (or four) steps ahead."
That kind of homily doesn't apply well when you're dealing with an authoritarian regime that puts power above quality of life for its people. That kind of "competition" is a tilted playing field. Endorsing theft is bad enough without having the competition be unfair in the first place.
“That kind of homily doesn't apply well when you're dealing with an authoritarian regime that puts power above quality of life for its people. That kind of "competition" is a tilted playing field. Endorsing theft is bad enough without having the competition be unfair in the first place.”
Stop spouting BS from the rock you’re under. I bet you had never lived in China to actually know the difference between their “authoritarian regime” and your authoritarian regime that you’re living under.
Accusing someone of theft without proof is another thing about you. How about Apple, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung and many others (mostly American companies) stole from one another and stole from others. The first 2 are the biggest thefts of them all. I have proofs of that. Want me to dig them up?
“Industrial espionage” Lmao. It’s more like monopoly, mafia style of the accusing side.
Anyway, your point is correct. American companies are just as guilty of this sort of thing as Chinese companies. I think the difference is that Chinese companies sometimes have the acknowledged/publicly-known support of their government. Then again, maybe American companies do as well. I'm sure the US has captured and reverse engineered military technologies from enemy nations at various times and then paid US businesses to improve or reproduce said technologies. I'm thinking that was a practice done during World War II at the very least and might still be the case in modern times. Despite being in a relatively peaceful global situation, no nation states are standing still when it comes to technological development and private companies are very often at the center of industries that are relevant to those technologies.
Two or three fallacies in your first sentence. There's the old "shoot the messenger", the tiredest example of Internet "debate" standards, used by those without a rebuttal. Then, there is its tireless companion, the "pot kettle" fallacy. The third fallacy also seems to be the crystal ball, where you can magically know anything about my background.
Since the use of the most banal of all fallacies, ad hominem, in the first sentence of a post demonstrates a commitment to a lack of substance, I make it a policy of not reading the rest. I will add that even the Chinese government admitted that a huge portion of its soil is heavily polluted.
I am also not responsible for "doctoring" those lovely smog photos, or the rivers of garbage, or the lead smelters operating next to farmland. The more I have learned about life quality in China, the less I want to go live there. But, please feel free to do that yourself.
I'm not under a rock. I'm living in a place where there is green plant material. Chinese friends of mine, who were graduate students, said coming here was surprising because of the blue skies and the green stuff. Funny how there aren't universities under rocks.
IP costs money to develop. A lot of money in free countries, where engineers cannot be just forced to work for peanuts. China has been stealing US technologies for decades, and successive US administrations from (at least) Nixon to Obama just refused to perform their duties and protect US property.
ZTE was found to be selling products containing US-made components to Iran and North Korea in contravention of sanctions. There was plenty of proof in that case.
(Several replies to this post have been removed. Let's not do the grumpy-dodgy-conspiracy-theorist thing. And please don't register throw-away accounts on my site with the intention of starting fights and getting banned)
It isn't censorship. Ryan has every right to keep stupid shit from his platform - he has no obligation to provide a space for others to spout their nonsense. You are free to do that everywhere else on the internet- breitbart and stromtrooper and whatever, set up your own site. Ryan just wants to keep the quality of discussion on this site decent and I am glad he does. Kids and crazies can go play somewhere else.
Forget all these scumbag companies. Because they consistently fix prices, they deserve to have all their IP become public domain... Not cheesy wrist slap fees which are about equal to 1 days worth of profit from these greedy scumbags.
What you get when someone first decides what they want to argue and then pick arguments, ignoring the inconsistencies. Of course that is what you do when it is your job to defend your great communist home land...
Why not sanction UMC? It's them that supposedly stole trade secrets and has a lot more to loose if they can't do business with the US.
Eventually there will have to be more memory companies again. After Micron buying up ailing competitors and some of their old business partners that where licensing tech from Micron there hasn't really been space for any other players other than the three big ones.
Most semi companies has fabs in China. So I can't really see them widen the conflict, and being to aggressive would backfire quickly.
Btw, here in Sweden you can't get sentenced to more than six years for stealing trade secrets. I can't imagine that a country that has spent most of it's life stealing and copying stuff has ever sent anyone to prison for anything close to 15 years for theft of trade secrets. A quick check also shows that you can't get more than a 10 year sentence in Taiwan, so I'm not sure why the article brings up 15 years as it's not like the UMC employees has been extradited and is facing US courts.
Yeah I read the DOJ release, but you can't really convict people in Taiwan so it seems superfluous. Taiwan can't legally expel these people to the US and their crimes is really only against MMT. No need to reiterate that nonsense here. They might face a few years imprisonment in Taiwan, but won't set foot in a country that can extradite them to the US and won't pay any US fines.
Easy way to fix it is stop price fixing and supply a quality product at a good price. If not then you lower the barriers of entry to the market and now this happens.
So memory makers only have themselves to blame for this and I won't shed a tear for them.
This isn't blocking Chinese DRAM in general, just this particular company. From the article:
"Micron started to suspect that it had a leak of confidential information after JHICC and UMC demonstrated a presentation containing Micron’s code names at a recruiting event aimed at Micron staff in the U.S. In the meantime, Taiwanese authorities charged Stephen Chen of stealing trade secrets from Micron. After conducting an internal investigation, Micron filed a complaint against the said companies in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in December, 2017."
>There is a reason why China wants its semiconductor industry up and ready right now.
Yes there is. And economic expansion is only one reason. The other, which you do not mention, is the development of military weapons, e.g., aircraft, missiles, satellites, etc.
That's expected. China banned Micron sales from patent infringement of JHICC. What laughable excuse, JHICC can't even make its own DRAM without the help of Micron yet Micron products on sale in China for years suddenly infringe on their patents.
China is just doing what they always were doing, but the blame belongs to the American "profit only matters" companies that because of their runaway greed have and still are providing the "technological" rope that China will use to hang us with.
40 years of socialism got China the bicycle and the ox, 12 years of stealing the work of capitalism and they are poised to take over the world. Are you stupid?
Not the first time I have seen readers on Anandtech commented about DRAM and NAND Price fixing and they have absolutely NO idea how those business and Fab capacity planning works.
NAND prices has dropped by more than 60% from its peak. And in 2019 we will be looking at new low price / GB since 2016. As much as I hate the expensive NAND, NAND fab are huge and expensive, and can not be balanced out easily.
DRAM on the other hand is different challenges, likely won't have price fall until DDR5.
Sometimes it can be hard to see past the fact that Dram manufacturers already got hit once for price fixing. In three years they went to from decent lows to almost the most expensive it has been in decades and has leveled off instead of decreasing. That goes against the natural order even if there are good reasons for it.
Stop ur bs and remove the stick from your eye. 5 years ago we were buying 16GB for $60. Today instead of being twice cheaper it is twice more expensive. So price fixing is not obvious only to you
Either all these posters are in the Chinese social credit system and trying to score points, or we are well and truly fucked. I for one will fight our dystopian, socialist, Chinese overlords.
Why fight it? If the Chinese want to soak up all the costs and inefficiencies associated with non-specialized domestic production in an effort to internalize the whole supply chain for critical products, we may as well reap the benefits.
When the Japanese flooded the market with DRAM and forced US domestic companies out of the business they raised prices very high. Apple, for example, was heavily burned. It had invested a lot into the Lisa platform, which needed a lot of memory to support advanced features like cut and paste between multiple office apps, multitasking, and a GUI.
Apple went from a platform designed around 1 MB of RAM (512K at the bare minimum) and then tried to sell the public the Mac, a 128K platform. The result was an OS so butchered that it couldn't even support a hard disk. This wasn't merely greed on Apple's part, although there was that. It was also because DRAM prices went sky high.
The price fixing of DRAM by the Japanese caused a lot of pain, not just for companies like Apple, but for the whole industry. All the suffering Mac users had to deal with because the operating system was butchered to fit into 128K of RAM (e.g. horrible memory management that persisted until OS X) could have been avoided had Apple been able to more gracefully extend the Lisa platform. Apple also could have been more competitive against Microsoft since it had its own GUI office suite on Lisa as early as 1983. So, consumers also got stuck with the MS Office monopoly pricing, in part because of the DRAM situation. Apple's management mistakes are also part of the problem but not the whole story.
We were in a state of elevated RAM prices earlier this year as well. The result of that global market condition is the entry of new competitors and additional manufacturing capacity. Just like in your example situation, memory prices eventually fell due in part to technological advancement and manufacturing improvements, but also due to the entry of new competitors. What you see happening now is just capitalism. RAM prices were inflated and new competitors sought to reap profits by entering the market. The only part of that fact which draws anyone's attention is the fact that these are Chinese companies entering the market and they may have been a bit underhanded about getting the technology to become contenders. While that isn't exactly fair, we don't live in a world that is consistently fair. If not now, with DRAM production, it'll be later with some other thing being made by some other country.
"RAM prices were inflated and new competitors sought to reap profits by entering the market."
You have it backward.
The history I described had prices go up and the diversity of vendors go down. That's how flooding and price fixing works. That it may be corrected in the future is immaterial. It had a corrosive effect on tech.
To my knowledge as an European, global currency is US dollars, so US trade deficit is not a "serious" problem to US government, since they can print out dollars as much as they want (theoretically, of course).
Most of all, US consumers have received huge benefits of "cheap" products produced by China.
The real problem is that many US companies like HP, DELL, etc have suffered from overly high DRAM prices because Samsung and SK hynix intentionally adjusted their capacities to maximize their profits. Note the recent news saying that Samsung and SK hynix cancelled their capacity expansion plans to keep enjoying their profits.
Facebook, google, and MS also had to sacrifice their profits significantly due to higher cost of DRAM prices when constructing their data centers.
So, US will ultimately receive benefits if china produces memory chips.
Rumor has it that samsung poured huge amount of money to hire lobbyists for influencing US politicians to intensify tensions between US and china.
We should hope that US and china can build up mutually beneficial cooperative relationships instead of tensions.
"So, US will ultimately receive benefits if china produces memory chips."
I believe most of us have experience purchase cheaper imitations from China, expecting that we purchase the real thing of products. This happens a lot on Amazon. So I expect there are going to be some memory failures from these chips - and people will blame the make of computer instead.
I own lots of substitute products that were made in China. Some of them were/are obviously cheap knock-offs that failed or never quite did what there were supposed to do, but the majority of the things I've purchased that were made in China have served their intended purpose well for a reasonable period of time. Fraudulent products like SD cards that have far less than their rated capacity or SSDs stuffed with a cheap USB drive are a problem, but they are uncommon. I mean really, if you live in the US (not sure based on your English skills) you can easily look around at the things you own and see most of them bear a Made in China label.
Not food. Food is hidden with a lot of smoke and mirrors, like labels that say only "distributed by". Then, there is the "manufactured in" loophole. Who cares if the box was filled in Arkansas when the food going into it came from China?
Some food products, like fish, are labeled. However, how useful is it for shoppers who want to, for instance, buy shrimp at a chain like Kroger when the only "choice" is between the different packages that are China-sourced?
Then, there is the problem I mentioned in my previous post — the lack of minimum quality standards. China can't do that alone. It needs help from corruption in the governments that allow those products in, and especially — to dominate entire market spaces.
If food starts making people sick, it gets recalled and pulled off the market. Sure that reactionary system sucks, but its the same way for lots of other products from cell phone batteries to automobile safety features. Damage is done to suppliers and companies suffer or go bankrupt because of it. Corruption only goes so far before the relatively free markets speak with their wallets.
"If food starts making people sick, it gets recalled and pulled off the market."
Only if it kills people quickly/obviously, like the melamine milk. There is a lot of toxicity hidden in food right now. Lead in chocolate. Arsenic from "inert" trade secret herbicide formulations. Arsenic from contaminated soil, feathers, and bones coming from poultry and pork operations. Arsenic from rice, especially brown rice (ironically being pushed as a health food). Hexavalent chromium from rock phosphate.
Chronic poisoning is easy to fool the public with because it can look like the symptoms of aging. Acute poisoning is really beside the point, when looking at the bigger picture problem. The profit is mainly in selling products that are just toxic enough to not be linked too easily by the easily-distractable and often-purchased media.
A journal article was released this January that showed that glyphosate is a lie. The "inert" ingredients (which are vastly more toxic to both plants and people) are the ones that are actually doing the herbicidal work. But, those "inert" ingredients aren't what governments base their "safe" dilutions on, nor are they even listed on the package in significant detail or at all. Inorganic arsenic is a highly-potent herbicide so they sneak it in, along with things like POEA (thousands of times more toxic than glyphosate).
But, before anyone responds to this with "Well, you see! The US is just as bad as China", it's not. Its bad, but it's not even close to as bad as China. The US had its period of dumping huge quantities of arsenic and lead into soil but then it switched to DDT. The US developed the EPA, mainly due to outrage over rivers catching fire, like the Cuyahoga (thirteen times or so) and the Ohio. China has a very long way to go to catch up to where the US is, even though the US should be doing a lot better. The unfortunate fact about things like soil contamination is that they are highly-persistent. The arsenic in Missouri soils that still causes its brown rice to measure very high is from before DDT and later insecticides. There is no free lunch. You make people sick today and tomorrow, just so certain corrupt politicians and business figures can live in luxury.
Take China li-ion flashlights for example, you can get a bargain basement one with vastly exaggerated numbers for as low as $2, but they are still plenty good for most people. The next step up will the $15-30 OEM lights that performs just as well as the same made in China but US branded ones that costs 3-4x more. If you want to trash the former for false advertising, fine, but keep in mind nobody else can even put out a workable product this cheap.
"I believe most of us have experience purchase cheaper imitations from China, expecting that we purchase the real thing of products. This happens a lot on Amazon."
Entire markets have been destroyed by garbage-grade products produced in sweatshop economies. A good example is the oil-filled space heater. I have been unable to find a single unit for sale that is built to even minimum standards of reliability and safety.
They leak oil within a short time span. They off-gas horrible odors (regardless of the claims by reviewers that such odors will go away). When they begin to leak internally they burn more oil, causing more fumes. My family, as a whole, purchased a total of eight units and the power level knobs failed on all of them within two years. Most of them developed slow and noxious "odor" leaks. When I removed the face panel on one recently I discovered that serious corrosion was on the flimsy electrical connectors and there was a ring of black char from burning oil. The unit, which had a non-working power level switch, would still run. Many of them simply stop working randomly.
There is no legitimate reason why a product that fills a very useful niche should be impossible to purchase with adequate quality. But, if you go to Amazon, you find that the site intentionally substitutes reviews for unrelated products, like small portable ceramic heaters, for its oil-filled heater listings. There is so much fraud in business that it can be cut with a knife, like the smell one gets in one's house from these space heaters.
The current higher price of DRAM is so minuscule to the overall cost of a Data Center it's virtually a rounding error to these $400B+ companies, especially considering the critical value it provides.
I find that unlikely - software aside RAM and flash memory (SSDs) are the two largest line items by far on server purchases at the enterprise level, I would *assume* a data center would be similar
Fortunately "The Maxwell Equations" are Scottish made, and Max Planck and Schrödinger and their cronies were busy with other matters or at any rate not on the payroll of some US "Entity". So, it will be some time before one of the US, Do.'s finds its way to their ownership, unless of course the facts that they were all "terrrrrrrrrrrrrists" emerges from some think tank research in the US and we all have to rethink basic science again.
Cool, I had no idea that the nitty-gritty details of a semiconductor fabrication process were as fundamental and derivable from first principles as the Maxwell and Schrödinger equations. While you’re at it, could you also derive the design of the Golden Gate Bridge from Newton’s Laws, or the formula for Coke from the Bohr Model?
I know some people will not like this here, but I wonder if that China stuff has even bigger issue with early news that AMD did Joint Venture with China.
While usurping attempts don't fair easily in general, who knows if China won't be the next Germany in a few years...
"The British originally introduced the "made in" label in the late 19th century to protect their economy from cheap counterfeit goods produced in Germany. Ironically, with the Germans now sitting at the top of the scale, the U.K. has been pushed down to (a still respectable) fourth in the rankings."
I feel a bit sad to see that nationalistic arguments are coming back in the comments. I so much hoped that this was 20th century...I my opinion, for progress everybody needs to work together, no matter which nationality. Nationalism was a 19th century invention. Up to the 18th century there where no real nations, just arbitrary kingdoms put together by a few strongmen which much later called themselves nobility. And those people owned everybody else. And the whole discussion about who copies from whom: I do not know of any single company or industry where IP was not copied from one place to the other. Until the 20th century, there was no such thing as patents or copyright. At the end, this was never the real reason behind why some companies or entrepreneurs got successful or not. Patents are of essence today, because of the large capital put into it. But there will always be leakage. As the industry in China is now also owning a lot of IP, IP protection is strengthening there, too. Meanwhile production of many goods is already shifting towards other countries like Thailand, Vietnam, etc. Mainly to the benefit of (US) brand companies.
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alin - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
Or moan about loosing the monopoly/price fixing and bring in US DOC to fight in your war for free. They already hate the chinese, they wont need actual proof just a great story to start the war, just like in ZTE case.BannedForTellingTheTruth - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
Can't have 300 USD phones be equivalent to 1200 - 1500 USD phones now can we.Have to get rid of the competition somehow, because monopoly is the only game allowed in town.
Samus - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
People are always going to copy you. Always. That's why you need to stay one (or four) steps ahead.Fuck it. Give them 20nm and flat gated cell technology. Old news by the time they start tapping out decent yields.
Oxford Guy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
When Fairchild apparently hired a guy who stole IP along with him and they made the F8 CPU, the company that the IP was stolen from never recovered. By the time the courts got done with the case the benefits had already been wrung from the IP in Fairchild's favor.Corporate espionage is a very serious thing and it's not new. It's easy to resort to conspiracy theories but sometimes the conspiracy isn't the one your pet speculation leads you to.
"People are always going to copy you. Always. That's why you need to stay one (or four) steps ahead."
That kind of homily doesn't apply well when you're dealing with an authoritarian regime that puts power above quality of life for its people. That kind of "competition" is a tilted playing field. Endorsing theft is bad enough without having the competition be unfair in the first place.
sonny73n - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link
“That kind of homily doesn't apply well when you're dealing with an authoritarian regime that puts power above quality of life for its people. That kind of "competition" is a tilted playing field. Endorsing theft is bad enough without having the competition be unfair in the first place.”Stop spouting BS from the rock you’re under. I bet you had never lived in China to actually know the difference between their “authoritarian regime” and your authoritarian regime that you’re living under.
Accusing someone of theft without proof is another thing about you. How about Apple, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung and many others (mostly American companies) stole from one another and stole from others. The first 2 are the biggest thefts of them all. I have proofs of that. Want me to dig them up?
“Industrial espionage” Lmao. It’s more like monopoly, mafia style of the accusing side.
PeachNCream - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
Isn't Google still paying Microsoft a fee for every Android sold due to intellectual property theft?https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/201...
Anyway, your point is correct. American companies are just as guilty of this sort of thing as Chinese companies. I think the difference is that Chinese companies sometimes have the acknowledged/publicly-known support of their government. Then again, maybe American companies do as well. I'm sure the US has captured and reverse engineered military technologies from enemy nations at various times and then paid US businesses to improve or reproduce said technologies. I'm thinking that was a practice done during World War II at the very least and might still be the case in modern times. Despite being in a relatively peaceful global situation, no nation states are standing still when it comes to technological development and private companies are very often at the center of industries that are relevant to those technologies.
Oxford Guy - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
"American companies are just as guilty of this sort of thing as Chinese companies."This is called the tu quoque (pot kettle) fallacy.
Oxford Guy - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
"Stop spouting BS from the rock you’re under."Two or three fallacies in your first sentence. There's the old "shoot the messenger", the tiredest example of Internet "debate" standards, used by those without a rebuttal. Then, there is its tireless companion, the "pot kettle" fallacy. The third fallacy also seems to be the crystal ball, where you can magically know anything about my background.
Since the use of the most banal of all fallacies, ad hominem, in the first sentence of a post demonstrates a commitment to a lack of substance, I make it a policy of not reading the rest. I will add that even the Chinese government admitted that a huge portion of its soil is heavily polluted.
I am also not responsible for "doctoring" those lovely smog photos, or the rivers of garbage, or the lead smelters operating next to farmland. The more I have learned about life quality in China, the less I want to go live there. But, please feel free to do that yourself.
I'm not under a rock. I'm living in a place where there is green plant material. Chinese friends of mine, who were graduate students, said coming here was surprising because of the blue skies and the green stuff. Funny how there aren't universities under rocks.
peevee - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
IP costs money to develop. A lot of money in free countries, where engineers cannot be just forced to work for peanuts.China has been stealing US technologies for decades, and successive US administrations from (at least) Nixon to Obama just refused to perform their duties and protect US property.
"Globalist" is just a PC word for "traitor".
londedoganet - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
ZTE was found to be selling products containing US-made components to Iran and North Korea in contravention of sanctions. There was plenty of proof in that case.Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
(Several replies to this post have been removed. Let's not do the grumpy-dodgy-conspiracy-theorist thing. And please don't register throw-away accounts on my site with the intention of starting fights and getting banned)vladx - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link
Amusing, you're doing your government bidding by censoring "wrong think".Shame what a shithole AnandTech has become nowadays.
jospoortvliet - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link
It isn't censorship. Ryan has every right to keep stupid shit from his platform - he has no obligation to provide a space for others to spout their nonsense. You are free to do that everywhere else on the internet- breitbart and stromtrooper and whatever, set up your own site. Ryan just wants to keep the quality of discussion on this site decent and I am glad he does. Kids and crazies can go play somewhere else.BannedForTellingTheTruth - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
Guess Memory Fab Cartel bit down and all chipped in to pay Donald Trump + cronies off and now we have total Memory Fab Cartel pricing forever now.Inb4 8 gB of DDR5 is now projected to be 10,000 USD per stick.
Nothing like combining the trade wars before WWI with the Tariff wars before WWII to make it obvious that we are not far from WWIII
Pneumothorax - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
Forget all these scumbag companies. Because they consistently fix prices, they deserve to have all their IP become public domain... Not cheesy wrist slap fees which are about equal to 1 days worth of profit from these greedy scumbags.Adramtech - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Pneumothorax, public domain IP would put them all out of business and render your computer worthless. You can build your own $5B fab and get cracking.Oxford Guy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Fascinating logic. You're literally saying that one crime is okay (corporate espionage theft) and another is not (corporate insider price fixing).jospoortvliet - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link
What you get when someone first decides what they want to argue and then pick arguments, ignoring the inconsistencies. Of course that is what you do when it is your job to defend your great communist home land...Notmyusualid - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
+1Penti - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
Why not sanction UMC? It's them that supposedly stole trade secrets and has a lot more to loose if they can't do business with the US.Eventually there will have to be more memory companies again. After Micron buying up ailing competitors and some of their old business partners that where licensing tech from Micron there hasn't really been space for any other players other than the three big ones.
Most semi companies has fabs in China. So I can't really see them widen the conflict, and being to aggressive would backfire quickly.
Btw, here in Sweden you can't get sentenced to more than six years for stealing trade secrets. I can't imagine that a country that has spent most of it's life stealing and copying stuff has ever sent anyone to prison for anything close to 15 years for theft of trade secrets. A quick check also shows that you can't get more than a 10 year sentence in Taiwan, so I'm not sure why the article brings up 15 years as it's not like the UMC employees has been extradited and is facing US courts.
londedoganet - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
The figure of 15 years comes from the indictment by the US Department of Justice, which of course operates under US law.Penti - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Yeah I read the DOJ release, but you can't really convict people in Taiwan so it seems superfluous. Taiwan can't legally expel these people to the US and their crimes is really only against MMT. No need to reiterate that nonsense here. They might face a few years imprisonment in Taiwan, but won't set foot in a country that can extradite them to the US and won't pay any US fines.londedoganet - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link
They’ve also been indicted separately in Taiwan, FWIW.Penti - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
Which won't give them millions in fines and a 15 year sentence as I said. I'm not even sure all of them resides in Taiwan anymore either.Marlin1975 - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
Easy way to fix it is stop price fixing and supply a quality product at a good price. If not then you lower the barriers of entry to the market and now this happens.So memory makers only have themselves to blame for this and I won't shed a tear for them.
Alistair - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
This isn't blocking Chinese DRAM in general, just this particular company. From the article:"Micron started to suspect that it had a leak of confidential information after JHICC and UMC demonstrated a presentation containing Micron’s code names at a recruiting event aimed at Micron staff in the U.S. In the meantime, Taiwanese authorities charged Stephen Chen of stealing trade secrets from Micron. After conducting an internal investigation, Micron filed a complaint against the said companies in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in December, 2017."
State of Affairs - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
>There is a reason why China wants its semiconductor industry up and ready right now.Yes there is. And economic expansion is only one reason. The other, which you do not mention, is the development of military weapons, e.g., aircraft, missiles, satellites, etc.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
... and more land-grabbing.s.yu - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
That's expected.China banned Micron sales from patent infringement of JHICC. What laughable excuse, JHICC can't even make its own DRAM without the help of Micron yet Micron products on sale in China for years suddenly infringe on their patents.
1prophet - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
China is just doing what they always were doing, but the blame belongs to the American "profit only matters" companies that because of their runaway greed have and still are providing the "technological" rope that China will use to hang us with.coburn_c - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
40 years of socialism got China the bicycle and the ox, 12 years of stealing the work of capitalism and they are poised to take over the world. Are you stupid?iwod - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Not the first time I have seen readers on Anandtech commented about DRAM and NAND Price fixing and they have absolutely NO idea how those business and Fab capacity planning works.NAND prices has dropped by more than 60% from its peak. And in 2019 we will be looking at new low price / GB since 2016. As much as I hate the expensive NAND, NAND fab are huge and expensive, and can not be balanced out easily.
DRAM on the other hand is different challenges, likely won't have price fall until DDR5.
Topweasel - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Sometimes it can be hard to see past the fact that Dram manufacturers already got hit once for price fixing. In three years they went to from decent lows to almost the most expensive it has been in decades and has leveled off instead of decreasing. That goes against the natural order even if there are good reasons for it.SanX - Saturday, November 10, 2018 - link
Stop ur bs and remove the stick from your eye. 5 years ago we were buying 16GB for $60. Today instead of being twice cheaper it is twice more expensive. So price fixing is not obvious only to youcoburn_c - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Either all these posters are in the Chinese social credit system and trying to score points, or we are well and truly fucked. I for one will fight our dystopian, socialist, Chinese overlords.PeachNCream - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Why fight it? If the Chinese want to soak up all the costs and inefficiencies associated with non-specialized domestic production in an effort to internalize the whole supply chain for critical products, we may as well reap the benefits.Oxford Guy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
When the Japanese flooded the market with DRAM and forced US domestic companies out of the business they raised prices very high. Apple, for example, was heavily burned. It had invested a lot into the Lisa platform, which needed a lot of memory to support advanced features like cut and paste between multiple office apps, multitasking, and a GUI.Apple went from a platform designed around 1 MB of RAM (512K at the bare minimum) and then tried to sell the public the Mac, a 128K platform. The result was an OS so butchered that it couldn't even support a hard disk. This wasn't merely greed on Apple's part, although there was that. It was also because DRAM prices went sky high.
The price fixing of DRAM by the Japanese caused a lot of pain, not just for companies like Apple, but for the whole industry. All the suffering Mac users had to deal with because the operating system was butchered to fit into 128K of RAM (e.g. horrible memory management that persisted until OS X) could have been avoided had Apple been able to more gracefully extend the Lisa platform. Apple also could have been more competitive against Microsoft since it had its own GUI office suite on Lisa as early as 1983. So, consumers also got stuck with the MS Office monopoly pricing, in part because of the DRAM situation. Apple's management mistakes are also part of the problem but not the whole story.
PeachNCream - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
We were in a state of elevated RAM prices earlier this year as well. The result of that global market condition is the entry of new competitors and additional manufacturing capacity. Just like in your example situation, memory prices eventually fell due in part to technological advancement and manufacturing improvements, but also due to the entry of new competitors. What you see happening now is just capitalism. RAM prices were inflated and new competitors sought to reap profits by entering the market. The only part of that fact which draws anyone's attention is the fact that these are Chinese companies entering the market and they may have been a bit underhanded about getting the technology to become contenders. While that isn't exactly fair, we don't live in a world that is consistently fair. If not now, with DRAM production, it'll be later with some other thing being made by some other country.Oxford Guy - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
"RAM prices were inflated and new competitors sought to reap profits by entering the market."You have it backward.
The history I described had prices go up and the diversity of vendors go down. That's how flooding and price fixing works. That it may be corrected in the future is immaterial. It had a corrosive effect on tech.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
Yes, the politboro accounts are very busy today it seems...ResourceM - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Well......To my knowledge as an European, global currency is US dollars, so US trade deficit is not a "serious" problem to US government, since they can print out dollars as much as they want (theoretically, of course).
Most of all, US consumers have received huge benefits of "cheap" products produced by China.
The real problem is that many US companies like HP, DELL, etc have suffered from overly high DRAM prices because Samsung and SK hynix intentionally adjusted their capacities to maximize their profits. Note the recent news saying that Samsung and SK hynix cancelled their capacity expansion plans to keep enjoying their profits.
Facebook, google, and MS also had to sacrifice their profits significantly due to higher cost of DRAM prices when constructing their data centers.
So, US will ultimately receive benefits if china produces memory chips.
Rumor has it that samsung poured huge amount of money to hire lobbyists for influencing US politicians to intensify tensions between US and china.
We should hope that US and china can build up mutually beneficial cooperative relationships instead of tensions.
HStewart - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
"So, US will ultimately receive benefits if china produces memory chips."I believe most of us have experience purchase cheaper imitations from China, expecting that we purchase the real thing of products. This happens a lot on Amazon. So I expect there are going to be some memory failures from these chips - and people will blame the make of computer instead.
PeachNCream - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
I own lots of substitute products that were made in China. Some of them were/are obviously cheap knock-offs that failed or never quite did what there were supposed to do, but the majority of the things I've purchased that were made in China have served their intended purpose well for a reasonable period of time. Fraudulent products like SD cards that have far less than their rated capacity or SSDs stuffed with a cheap USB drive are a problem, but they are uncommon. I mean really, if you live in the US (not sure based on your English skills) you can easily look around at the things you own and see most of them bear a Made in China label.Oxford Guy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Not food. Food is hidden with a lot of smoke and mirrors, like labels that say only "distributed by". Then, there is the "manufactured in" loophole. Who cares if the box was filled in Arkansas when the food going into it came from China?Some food products, like fish, are labeled. However, how useful is it for shoppers who want to, for instance, buy shrimp at a chain like Kroger when the only "choice" is between the different packages that are China-sourced?
Then, there is the problem I mentioned in my previous post — the lack of minimum quality standards. China can't do that alone. It needs help from corruption in the governments that allow those products in, and especially — to dominate entire market spaces.
PeachNCream - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
If food starts making people sick, it gets recalled and pulled off the market. Sure that reactionary system sucks, but its the same way for lots of other products from cell phone batteries to automobile safety features. Damage is done to suppliers and companies suffer or go bankrupt because of it. Corruption only goes so far before the relatively free markets speak with their wallets.Oxford Guy - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
"If food starts making people sick, it gets recalled and pulled off the market."Only if it kills people quickly/obviously, like the melamine milk. There is a lot of toxicity hidden in food right now. Lead in chocolate. Arsenic from "inert" trade secret herbicide formulations. Arsenic from contaminated soil, feathers, and bones coming from poultry and pork operations. Arsenic from rice, especially brown rice (ironically being pushed as a health food). Hexavalent chromium from rock phosphate.
Chronic poisoning is easy to fool the public with because it can look like the symptoms of aging. Acute poisoning is really beside the point, when looking at the bigger picture problem. The profit is mainly in selling products that are just toxic enough to not be linked too easily by the easily-distractable and often-purchased media.
A journal article was released this January that showed that glyphosate is a lie. The "inert" ingredients (which are vastly more toxic to both plants and people) are the ones that are actually doing the herbicidal work. But, those "inert" ingredients aren't what governments base their "safe" dilutions on, nor are they even listed on the package in significant detail or at all. Inorganic arsenic is a highly-potent herbicide so they sneak it in, along with things like POEA (thousands of times more toxic than glyphosate).
But, before anyone responds to this with "Well, you see! The US is just as bad as China", it's not. Its bad, but it's not even close to as bad as China. The US had its period of dumping huge quantities of arsenic and lead into soil but then it switched to DDT. The US developed the EPA, mainly due to outrage over rivers catching fire, like the Cuyahoga (thirteen times or so) and the Ohio. China has a very long way to go to catch up to where the US is, even though the US should be doing a lot better. The unfortunate fact about things like soil contamination is that they are highly-persistent. The arsenic in Missouri soils that still causes its brown rice to measure very high is from before DDT and later insecticides. There is no free lunch. You make people sick today and tomorrow, just so certain corrupt politicians and business figures can live in luxury.
StrangerGuy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Take China li-ion flashlights for example, you can get a bargain basement one with vastly exaggerated numbers for as low as $2, but they are still plenty good for most people. The next step up will the $15-30 OEM lights that performs just as well as the same made in China but US branded ones that costs 3-4x more. If you want to trash the former for false advertising, fine, but keep in mind nobody else can even put out a workable product this cheap.Oxford Guy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
"I believe most of us have experience purchase cheaper imitations from China, expecting that we purchase the real thing of products. This happens a lot on Amazon."Entire markets have been destroyed by garbage-grade products produced in sweatshop economies. A good example is the oil-filled space heater. I have been unable to find a single unit for sale that is built to even minimum standards of reliability and safety.
They leak oil within a short time span. They off-gas horrible odors (regardless of the claims by reviewers that such odors will go away). When they begin to leak internally they burn more oil, causing more fumes. My family, as a whole, purchased a total of eight units and the power level knobs failed on all of them within two years. Most of them developed slow and noxious "odor" leaks. When I removed the face panel on one recently I discovered that serious corrosion was on the flimsy electrical connectors and there was a ring of black char from burning oil. The unit, which had a non-working power level switch, would still run. Many of them simply stop working randomly.
There is no legitimate reason why a product that fills a very useful niche should be impossible to purchase with adequate quality. But, if you go to Amazon, you find that the site intentionally substitutes reviews for unrelated products, like small portable ceramic heaters, for its oil-filled heater listings. There is so much fraud in business that it can be cut with a knife, like the smell one gets in one's house from these space heaters.
Adramtech - Saturday, November 3, 2018 - link
The current higher price of DRAM is so minuscule to the overall cost of a Data Center it's virtually a rounding error to these $400B+ companies, especially considering the critical value it provides.Icehawk - Sunday, November 4, 2018 - link
I find that unlikely - software aside RAM and flash memory (SSDs) are the two largest line items by far on server purchases at the enterprise level, I would *assume* a data center would be similarversesuvius - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Fortunately "The Maxwell Equations" are Scottish made, and Max Planck and Schrödinger and their cronies were busy with other matters or at any rate not on the payroll of some US "Entity". So, it will be some time before one of the US, Do.'s finds its way to their ownership, unless of course the facts that they were all "terrrrrrrrrrrrrists" emerges from some think tank research in the US and we all have to rethink basic science again.StrangerGuy - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
We all know the US are definitely not guys with the most double standards, tsk tsk tsk.londedoganet - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Cool, I had no idea that the nitty-gritty details of a semiconductor fabrication process were as fundamental and derivable from first principles as the Maxwell and Schrödinger equations. While you’re at it, could you also derive the design of the Golden Gate Bridge from Newton’s Laws, or the formula for Coke from the Bohr Model?versesuvius - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
Yes.londedoganet - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
I look forward eagerly to your monograph.HStewart - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link
I know some people will not like this here, but I wonder if that China stuff has even bigger issue with early news that AMD did Joint Venture with China.https://www.anandtech.com/show/10268/china-calling...
overseer - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
While usurping attempts don't fair easily in general, who knows if China won't be the next Germany in a few years..."The British originally introduced the "made in" label in the late 19th century to protect their economy from cheap counterfeit goods produced in Germany. Ironically, with the Germans now sitting at the top of the scale, the U.K. has been pushed down to (a still respectable) fourth in the rankings."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/03...
bebby - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I feel a bit sad to see that nationalistic arguments are coming back in the comments. I so much hoped that this was 20th century...I my opinion, for progress everybody needs to work together, no matter which nationality. Nationalism was a 19th century invention. Up to the 18th century there where no real nations, just arbitrary kingdoms put together by a few strongmen which much later called themselves nobility. And those people owned everybody else.And the whole discussion about who copies from whom: I do not know of any single company or industry where IP was not copied from one place to the other. Until the 20th century, there was no such thing as patents or copyright. At the end, this was never the real reason behind why some companies or entrepreneurs got successful or not. Patents are of essence today, because of the large capital put into it. But there will always be leakage. As the industry in China is now also owning a lot of IP, IP protection is strengthening there, too. Meanwhile production of many goods is already shifting towards other countries like Thailand, Vietnam, etc. Mainly to the benefit of (US) brand companies.