If anything this shows how totally fucked equity markets are.

• Predicted $732MM revenue, reported $805MM (10% higher than projected)
• Expected 54MM DAU, got 53.2MM (1.5% lower than projected)
• Expected daily users growth of 130.07MM, actual growth 130.3MM (0.2% higher than projected)

So they’re making way more money than expected, but they haven’t sold out their users fast enough so dump the stock?

You will absolutely be allowed on the counter when you follow the same rule that humans follow for working on the counter- wash your hands/paws with soap and water first.

Not into that? Then you stay on the floor.

Most welcome :)

In some ways yes. Older designs on older nodes use older equipment- less precise, easier to build. There’s actually a lot of PC builders who are building machines on DDR4 mainboards because the memory is more affordable. A couple of DDR4 mainboards have been ‘un-discontinued’ as a result.

For a desktop or laptop PC, the difference of DDR4 to DDR5 often doesn’t make a huge difference. So you get a last-gen chipset and RAM and you get a decent machine without paying $thousands extra.

Most welcome :)

No they can’t. Building a fab costs $10-20 billion and takes 2-4 years. And that’s assuming you have the people, the expertise, and the IP to be able to produce memory in your new fab.

Now Valve is privately held, 50+% owned by GabeN, so real numbers aren’t public. But it’s estimated to be worth around $20-40 billion. That’s why he can afford to spend his time driving around on yachts and submarines. That means if Valve wanted to, they might be able to get into the business.

But from a business POV, it’d be a HUGE risk. You’re betting basically half the company that you can go in with ZERO experience in semiconductor manufacturing and start making top tier memory, AND that by the time you can bring it to market there’ll still be any demand for it. That’s a BIG risk. And given that they’re making money hand over first selling hardware built by others, it’s not a risk they have any need to take.

The problem is it’s not quite so easy.

If this was making things like cars or toilet paper, where the design and manufacturing methods are well understood, that’s exactly what would happen.

Making computer chips was well understood. You take a slice of single-crystal silicon, dope its surface with something, use a photo mask and a light to etch off the doping where you don’t want it. Repeat that process a few dozen or a few hundred times to etch transistors into the silicon, then slice it up into chips and package them.

Machines that do this are readily available.

The problem is, we made those transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

Then we ran into problems like how to etch features on the silicon that are smaller than the wavelength of light. And we found solutions to that. And so we made the transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

So now to create a current-gen computer chip, you need a process called EUV- Extreme Ultra Violet. Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, so when you want smaller wavelength to etch smaller features into the chip you eventually go from red to blue to ultraviolet and eventually to extreme ultraviolet. Problem THERE is there’s no EUV bulbs available, and if there were they’d be useless because atmospheric air absorbs EUV, and even if you do it in a vacuum glass absorbs EUV too so lenses don’t work. So you can only manipulate this light with mirrors, which have to be ground to an absolutely insane level of precision.

The resulting machine is quite impressive. You have a giant cavity kept in perfect vacuum. In one side you have an EUV source- that’s a little machine that dispenses a tiny 3-micron droplet of molten tin. As the droplet falls it’s hit by a laser to blast it into a pancake-like shape, then by another much bigger laser that vaporizes it. In the process of vaporizing it releases EUV light. So by blasting 50,000 droplets per second, you have a mostly continuous EUV light source. This light is reflected by shaped mirrors carved into the surfaces of the vacuum chamber that reflect and focus the EUV into a linear beam. Below that (also in vacuum) you have the mask and the silicon wafer, and by moving them back and forth under the beam you etch features ‘smaller than light’ into the chip.

The result is a chip with current pathways less than 100 silicon atoms wide. And if you want to make current-gen computer memory, that’s the only way we’ve got to build it.

EUV machines are pretty much only made by one company, ASML. They’re the size of a double decker bus, they cost a fortune ($200MM+), and they’re in insanely high demand. Like I’ve heard of a guy getting hired by a company for over million a year simply because he’s friends with a purchasing manager at ASML and might be able to get the company that hired him a build slot.

And it’s not just buy the machine and hit ‘start’, there’s a ton of other stuff involved. You need machines to make the photo masks, you need an ultra-clean cleanroom, you need a robotic facility where cassettes of wafers can be whisked from machine to machine with no exposure to even clean room air. And this is all highly specialized stuff, you don’t just call 1800-fab-4you and place an order.

Bottom line- even for a company that already has experience in current-gen chipmaking, setting up a fab like this costs $15-20 billion. And it isn’t just ‘sign a check and come back tomorrow’, the process of building a fab from the project being approved to the first wafer coming off the line is 2-3 years minimum.

Now here’s the bigger problem- semiconductors are always a cyclical market, or at least always have been. Demand (and thus prices) goes up, demand/prices come down. So if you invest $20 billion when prices are high, then in 2-3 years when the cycle is at its low nobody’s gonna be buying your output. And of course, adding more chips to the market will affect market prices (supply and demand). So companies that are building fabs have to look 5-10 years ahead to determine if they’ll get ROI on a fab before they build.

And that brings us to the next issue- with AI, we’re in uncharted territory. The computing market has been pretty well understood since the early 90s. There’s demand for PCs and laptops and servers and gadgets, and it goes up and down and new products come out that changes the mix of what’s ordered, but the cycle more or less continues. Up and down.
Then AI happens. And suddenly we have near-instant, unheard-of levels of demand. And it’s all for current-gen top-shelf stuff- HBM (high bandwidth memory) and GPUs and specialty silicon like NPUs.
Now there are more fabs being built. But it’s also starting to be better understood that AI is a bubble, which almost certainly will pop. So if you’re a DRAM maker and you spend $40 billion building a fleet of new fabs and then the bubble pops, you’re gonna be fucked. That’s why you don’t see everybody+dog diving into the DRAM market face first.

Okay here’s what I don’t get.
Awesome little gadget, good DAC, and the only Bluetooth codec it supports is SBC? No aac, no aptx hd, no ldac, no LE Audio?

Actually I would say the the one who goes to extra health should be whoever at Apple made the decision to use the patent encumbered HEIC format as the default for iPhone photos.

There are plenty of open picture formats that do the same thing without a patent tax.

Focusing on the Xbox side- the sensationalist headline masks the real story.

Most of these job losses aren’t layoffs, they are studios being sold or spun off and many/most of those people will keep their jobs.

And on the Xbox side at least, this is a VERY good thing.

Hard truth #1: Xbox is losing money, and MS will not keep subsidizing a money-losing division forever. Xbox needs to be profitable if it is to continue.

The Phil Spencer / GamePass strategy was to adopt the Netflix business model- buy a ton of indie studios, crank out tons of games to fill up GamePass, everybody subscribes. Put simply, this plan failed. A couple AAA games and three pages of games you’ve never heard of from publishers you’ve never heard of is not a compelling value proposition to a gamer who has finite gaming time. Especially when you’re already planning to play other AAA games being released.

The other problem was a stupid organizational structure. Apparently some parts of XBOX had 14 (!) levels of management. Asha wants to cut that to 3-5 levels (which IMHO is the right call). That means a lot of project managers and department heads and the like who don’t really add much overall value but cost a lot and make changes take exponentially longer.

Combine this and you have a large, top-heavy organization that’s producing games that aren’t selling consoles and aren’t selling GamePass subscriptions. Something had to change, and this is it.

Personally I think XBOX is in a better place today than yesterday. The resulting company won’t be trying to develop every game, they will be focusing on bringing in exclusives and hopefully focused on good first party games like Halo. And with much lower costs, hopefully they will be much more profitable to the point that XBOX has a profitable future.

I’ve not been able to find any solid intel on what actually happened to the wafers.

Thing is though- cutting wafers and packaging can be done at any fab so in theory they could find an older fab with excess capacity and pay them to do some of it.

Binning however requires some more specialized equipment, that from what I understand is more specific to the type of chips you’re making. This is where you test each individual chip- out of a wafer you’ll get some great ones, some good ones, some bad ones, and some that don’t work at all. Thus ‘binning’ is taking a stream of chips and sorting them into bins by their maximum speed, stability, etc.
You might find a fab that has the equipment to bin DRAM chips but not the means to manufacture those chips. Still it seems an odd use of resources to get into the chip production business when your core business has nothing to do with chips.

I’d like to see a lawsuit like this against OpenAI.

They bought a combined total of 40% of the world’s 2026 memory production- not as usable modules, but as finished wafers. Those wafers have to be sliced into individual chips, which are then tested (binned) and packaged into modules, which themselves get mounted on a PCB with some support circuity to make a DIMM.
OpenAI (as far as I know) doesn’t have the equipment to do that.
So chances are those finished wafers are either in the trash or sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Question becomes- to what end? To drive up prices for other AI companies? To manipulate the market and then sell those wafers in small batches at great premium?

IMHO- unless they can show those wafers have been processed packaged and put in servers, they should also be sued.

More like

• sell company to Sony for hugely inflated price promising to be the linchpin of their live service strategy

• have one game that does okay, another game that everybody hates

• leadership bleeds money through a fire hose

• everyone is surprised when this doesn’t work

Ever look at the back seat of a modern vehicle? It’s almost never a flat bench. There’s indentations, they’re just less deep than the front seat.

actually that little extra material makes a big difference.

Look at it from the side (IE put a camera where your spine would be), same on the bottom where your leg would be. There’s several good square inches of ‘wall’, much more than just a seat belt.

And while it is angled up somewhat, the seat belt is doing a great job pulling you back down into it.

If you mean the middle rear, probably because there’s nothing in front of you. It may be the safest overall, not necessarily the safest in a side impact.

Those are both bucket seats, just to different degrees.

Imagine a camera placed where the spine or leg is looking at the side of the seat. Look at how much exposed surface area faces the camera. Let’s call that surface area the ‘side restraint component’. (IE, if the side panel comes ‘up’ out of the seat 2", and extends out 4", the side restraint component is 2").

On a seat belt, you’ve got about 2" x 4" surface area on each side. So 8 square inches on each side. That’s all a bench seat gives you.

On that car seat you’ve got about 2.5" x 8" on the back, plus an average of let’s call it 2.5" x 4" on the seat. So that’s about 30 square inches on each side.

On the racing seat you’ve got about 14" x 20", but cut in half as a triangle, and let’s say the shoulder bit fills in the missing part by the belt opening. So call that 140 square inches per side.

The car seat may be designed for comfort, but the side bolsters do have a restraint effect.

It’s one of the benefits of a bucket seat, and you’ll note front seats have a bucket shape both on the back and the bottom. This does a LOT to keep a human in place, especially if the seatbelt is holding the human down into the bucket. Lots of surface area on the side of the leg and torso for the bucket shape. OTOH with a bench seat there’s nothing at all keeping the human in place, there’s just the 3 places where the strap crosses the human and those don’t do very much. Seat belts are designed to keep you down in the seat.

This exactly.

Bench seats are great for hanging out with afore mentioned dog and/or girl.
Bench seats are super shitty in any sort of side impact collision. There’s nothing keeping you in place except your safety belt.

I wanna know what’s happening with all those finished wafers they bought.

If they aren’t being made into memory modules I think someone should go to jail.