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1 Hour Power Outage at Micron Manufacturing Plant Could Mean Increased DRAM Prices Throughout 2021
- Thread starter kostacurtas
- Start date
- News
its like how some factory can pump thousands of products in seconds. 1 hour probably cost them millions.
Yeah, how is a power outage affecting 10% of supply? Do these factories work on reserved time or something, and if the power is out they dont get the time back?
"Because we said so and you have no way to disprove it, shut up and buy it for the price we want"
I thought the exact same thing. I'm not a manufacturing expert but I would guess that it would be something along the lines that when the power came back on they had to safely restart everything clearly up bottle necks. So it could have take up to multiple days to fully "restart" and make sure the process is going smooth. Alternative option is that had to throw out stuff that was mid flight because the power outage fucked it all up.
I suppose wafers (the silicon disk used to manufacture the chips) were being processed at the time of the shortage and some were not in a stage where you can just pause the execution so they're basically lost. Knowing that a wafer can be a dozen thousands of chips, well... that's all the DRAM manufacturers were waiting for to increase the prices.
I had just recently thought about building a new PC in the near future. Does this mean I should by the RAM now before the prices shoot up?
1 hour of downtime affecting 10% of supply makes no sense.
Good point, i guess if they had to throw away a bunch of product i can see that.
Good point, i guess if they had to throw away a bunch of product i can see that.
OP
OP
I am afraid that usually this is the case.
When a manufacturer absorbs the loss is the exception.
during the one hour power outage it's very possible numerous stages of manufacturing were in delicate actions. it's not like a consoles rest mode where you can just turn it off and pick up exactly where you were. it's like an hours power outage at a server farm, it's going to take time to get things back on. unlike with a server farm, you've got physical items that may be in unworkable states.
Less supply = higher prices
Everyone is competing for the same chips.
Also curious about this. What kind of PC components is this going to affect in the near to long term?
Man... They don't have.. like.. a generator or something? I have zero knowledge about this stuff though lol
Anything currently in the pipeline/production when the power dies is likely a write off meaning that volume is no longer viable. Could be that it takes a while for some of the process to complete
It always happens especially when it's an oligopoly (here, Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix). Huge demand, a natural catastrophe, cartel agreements, you name it.
How does that even work? That thing must be working non-stop 7/7 24/24 for sure but, 1 hour is still 0.0114% of the year's production..(⊙_☉)
Edit : Ah i understand now i think. To have that kind of impact, it most likely stopped the foundry and it jammed. If the molten Si solidifies, it pretty much means they have to scrap the crucible. I can't believe they would not have backups for that though.
Edit : Ah i understand now i think. To have that kind of impact, it most likely stopped the foundry and it jammed. If the molten Si solidifies, it pretty much means they have to scrap the crucible. I can't believe they would not have backups for that though.
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What? That makes no sense. Have they looked into buying those home cooking waffle machines? Maybe it would help them avoid such catastrophes, if their employees could switch to using those rather than the factory assembly line for an hour.
For a brucey bonus they may well have Business Interruption cover as part of their commercial property insurance.
So best case scenario for them is that they get paid for all the chips they didn't make PLUS sell all the chips they DO make at a markup because supply has gone down!
So best case scenario for them is that they get paid for all the chips they didn't make PLUS sell all the chips they DO make at a markup because supply has gone down!
SSD, Ram and GPU.
It is still crazy to me, that so much of our technology is made by companies in a country which not even recognized by most of the world
and threatened by China.
Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines too, that it's possible everything that was in the middle of doing something was effectively destroyed by the outage.
If that's the case, and every step is so sensitive like that, they really should have a better system of ensuring they don't lose power. There's all kinds of ways to maintain redundant power during a utility outage. Our company does it. We have giant UPSs on the most critical stuff, and a huge generator out back that can keep the entire building running pretty much indefinitely as long as it has fuel. You'd think a production line like this would have those kinds of protections, and if they did and this still happened, then heads gonna roll, 'cause somebody done fucked up.
Main components is SSD storage, RAM and anything that needs RAM (eg the GPU). This likely will affect phone and console production: DRAM prices has been dropping over the past year, and this will likely be an excuse for the Big Three DRAM producers to increase pricing.
Wow, crazy how dependant the world is on just a few companies.
Was thinking about buying RAM but I would need a GPU soonish too, which isn't happening for other reasons lol.
I imagine product makers like Sony, Xbox, Apple, Samsung already have set prices that I doubt they are flexible on. This seems like such an error on the person you're paying to make the product you are giving them money for, why would console or phone makers (especially the big ones) not just laugh when asked to pay more?
perhaps supply goes Down, yes, but wouldn't you just get what you can from them and sell as normal?
perhaps supply goes Down, yes, but wouldn't you just get what you can from them and sell as normal?
You have to look at the time it takes to manufacture the DRAM. If a power outage ruins the DRAM, then the time you've lost is how much time it takes to make the DRAM, not how much time the power was out.
If it takes me an hour to make a cake and someone ruins it, the time wasted isn't how long it took to ruin the cake. It's how long it took to make it in the first place. Now imagine the cake takes a week to make and that there was a whole assembly line of them.
To produce any chip, there are around 300 steps involved at nanometer technology. Some of these step involves mantaining a room clean. Like, no kind of dust in the air at all. Ti achieve that, they need to use air "renovations" all the time. Once it's powered on, it can't be powered off. Since those seem to be have powered off, yelds are probably heavy affected for now , and will take a time to all the devices that are going through production right now to shake off this problem.
I'm guessing there's many stages involved to make chips. Once each stage is started, they probably cannot be stopped. So if the whole factory is interrupted, each partial chip is worthless and can't be salvaged.
Think more like it takes 36 days to make a chip and if you lose power during that 36 days the entire batch is ruined. Thus 10% of the year is ruined. Obviously this is incredibly simplified but that's the basic mental model to use to think about it
Worked on Fab power ups at HP on the emergency side and I can say that 1 hour of downtime can absolutely destroy everything from internal timelines, to testing, to recertification for people to go back in, to shipping rescheduling, contacting clients, scheduling later retests of fixes, to recorrecting back to proper environmental, literally just a huge disaster.