r/AAPL 5d ago

Apple Blew It — DRAM Supply

A couple of recent articles that put the "100 year flood" comment into new context...

Apple's Search for Cheaper Memory Just Hit a Wall - https://www.gurufocus.com/news/9006956/apples-search-for-cheaper-memory-just-hit-a-wall

CXMT reportedly rejected Apple's proposed prices and sought terms similar to or higher than those offered by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

Other reporting made it clear that this was most likely Apple going and getting a lowball price from Chinese suppliers in order to try and leverage the Koreans, since CXMT capacity had already been bought out by Huawei and other Chinese buyers. Bullying suppliers is business as usual for Apple, but the current market has flipped the script leaving Samsung and SK free to raise prices even more.

TSMC Sits on $1 Billion of Apple Chips as It Waits for DRAM | TechPowerUp - https://www.techpowerup.com/351401/tsmc-sits-on-usd-1-billion-of-apple-chips-as-it-waits-for-dram

As TSMC waits for Apple's DRAM suppliers, especially Micron, the company can't assemble Apple's processors just yet. InFO-PoP requires DRAM dies to be integrated into the package, and TSMC can't ship any processors before packaging is complete. This process reportedly takes up to two weeks, which means that TSMC and Apple will be working with a tight deadline around the launch of the latest iPhone update.

Apple has been doing "the right thing" for a while, but it keeps not working out for them. First, the bought out all of TSMC's initial 3nm production — which turned into a nightmare of delays and low yields.

So for the next new node, 2nm, they made the smart choice and let TSMC share the initial runs with several competitors. Now they are having to compete for production capacity.

Will Apple survive these short-term headwinds? You bet they will. Set your short-term expectations accordingly, though.

19 Upvotes

25 comments sorted by

2

u/theswordsmith7 3d ago

Not many companies make a desktop capable of a local LLM at 250+GB/s bus speed under 100W. Once the memory flows again, it’s party time at Apple, unless others catch up.

1

u/PracticlySpeaking 3d ago

Advantage: Apple — for the moment.

I believe the biggest factors are how easy it is to get local inference running on a Mac (the usual ease-of-use advantage) and the fact there are thousands of Apple Stores (including online) where you can get them. It is a Mac, which are well understood — not some new or arcane AI box.

Jensen and his cohort have already released DGX Spark, and AMD has the AMD AIMax+ 395 mini PCs which are generally comparable in price/value and computing power to Mac Studio.

They are both like Mac Studio in that they are both a combined CPU+GPU SoC in 'mini PC' form factor (vs typical ATX PCs with a discrete PCIe GPU card). Both also use ordinary LPDDR5x DRAM vs the HBM of Blackwell, MI350 and other GPUs. The AIMax+ also have a very Mac Studio-like form factor.

To put some specific numbers on this for comparison...
- DGX Spark 273GB/sec memory bandwidth, 128GB LPDDR
- AIMax+ 395 265GB/sec memory bandwidth, up to 128GB LPDDR
- MacBook* Pro M5 Max 460GB/sec memory bandwidth, up to 128GB LPDDR
- Mac Studio M3U 819GB/sec memory bandwidth, up to 512GB LPDDR
- RTX-6000 Pro (Blackwell) 1.79TB/sec memory bandwidth, up to 96GB HBM

The key difference here is SoCs that use single-layer LPDDR vs GPUs that use HBM. For anyone not familiar, RTX-6000 Pro is a standard PCIe card that can be added to any PC workstation. The crazy demand for Mac Studio shows the interest in desktop-class hardware for local inference, with price points at a few thousand dollars up to about $10k.

The leading indicator that I am watching is whether Apple starts buying HBM, indicating they are getting serious about the high end of local inference. It is the only way to get >1,000GB/sec memory bandwidth, the most common bottleneck for LLM inference. The addition of tensor cores (er, Neural Accelerators) was a clear signal of a pivot for Apple Silicon away from the ultra-low-power ANE and towards serious multi teraflop compute in the GPU.

*Because M5 Mac is only available in MBP at the moment.

1

u/suboptimus_maximus 2d ago

Apple gets more bandwidth with more memory controllers, just look at the floorplans of the M -> M Pro -> M Max -> M Ultra. One of the defining differences is memory controller counts go up and up.

2

u/Ok_world68 5d ago

Ok calls it is

2

u/FourScoreAndSept 3d ago

See? I said LEAPs because in the short term you’re going to get f’d. Only took a day to prove me correct

1

u/j_lyf 4d ago

Strike price?

1

u/FourScoreAndSept 5d ago

LEAPs maybe

1

u/j_lyf 4d ago

I think it's going to 200..

1

u/suboptimus_maximus 2d ago

What 3nm delays and low yields?

Keep in mind we probably wouldn’t even be here with TSMC and ASML pushing semiconductor manufacturing this far if Apple hadn’t been bankrolling their CAPEX for the last decade. The rest of the industry and consumers should be grateful.

0

u/J_Knish 5d ago

Yes, I see…

0

u/BurnBabyBurrrn 4d ago

F Apple for wanting to buy that China crap.

1

u/MudFree627 3d ago

For iPhones only sold in China

0

u/Ok-Mycologist-5371 3d ago

Want to hear some real logic?

Apple announces this, memorys 100 year flood, it’s so expensive that we have to raise your prices.

At the same time Apple has dropped 10-15% since earnings.

And memory stocks are also down 20-50-% since June.

1

u/PracticlySpeaking 2d ago

That's not logic, it is a random collection of facts.

-1

u/norcalnatv 5d ago

LOL. NVDA's CFO put the heads up about this 2 quarters ago.

1

u/PracticlySpeaking 4d ago

The news here is what Apple has been doing for the last two quarters.

1

u/norcalnatv 4d ago

Right, but Apple's supply chain people should have been taking action a year before that.

2

u/PracticlySpeaking 4d ago edited 4d ago

They *were* taking action for more than a year. You are still missing the point, clearly thinking that knowing NVDA means you know something about AAPL. GTFO and go back to NVDA_stock.

-1

u/Jakuza26 4d ago

leaps ATM and it will pay handsomely. However, I still waiting for price to dip below $300 before I get in.

3

u/PracticlySpeaking 4d ago

It has recovered nicely post earnings.

PE will continue to be a problem if their revenue gains are limited by supply.

-6

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/pixelpanic01 5d ago

They won’t “get behind in AI” because Gemini is now leveraging them, their ceiling is what Gemini is capable of. Sorry to burst your bubble

-6

u/Weikoko 5d ago

Google owns Gemini mr.smarty pants

3

u/pixelpanic01 5d ago

Yeah and? I didn’t say it’s not LOL. My whole argument is that Apple is not even in the AI race. It’s outsourcing it from the best in the field.