Sounds rather more like a company behind the innovation curve pretending to "skip" the innovation as if to jump into a better innovation.
When the actual truth is they are sticking with the old thing. Reframed as a choice.
If "Ditching 4f" is such a good idea, why show their hand right before their competitors make the foolish choice of releasing it? Why not hold your cards until afterwards?
Unless perhaps this isn't a brilliant strategy but instead a spin for the investors?
It's a public company that is beholden to the shareholders. They have to explain what they are doing. But I agree with you, seems sus. Even if you can make more money by scaling the old tech today, that does not justify dropping the future innovation. Especially because by all accounts they are swimming in cash... Unless they are telling the truth and 4f extra complexity does not justify extra cost. I really have no context to evaluate that.
At the markups they are making they could be hand-soldering the bits and still be ahead, scaling existing process makes more sense than investing more in research.
> scaling existing process makes more sense than investing more in research.
It doesn't sound like they've stopped investing in research in general. Just one specific area.
"We've been working on this for decades and can't figure out how to commercialize it, so we're going to try different things" is a healthy result, even if other companies got different results.
When the actual truth is they are sticking with the old thing. Reframed as a choice.
If "Ditching 4f" is such a good idea, why show their hand right before their competitors make the foolish choice of releasing it? Why not hold your cards until afterwards?
Unless perhaps this isn't a brilliant strategy but instead a spin for the investors?
It's a public company that is beholden to the shareholders. They have to explain what they are doing. But I agree with you, seems sus. Even if you can make more money by scaling the old tech today, that does not justify dropping the future innovation. Especially because by all accounts they are swimming in cash... Unless they are telling the truth and 4f extra complexity does not justify extra cost. I really have no context to evaluate that.
I suspect it is because Micron is a publicly traded company, its management has to answer questions from the investor community.
And because DRAM is a commodity business, profits in the long term are possible even if a company does not win first-to-market profits.
Finally, there is always a market segment that is not betting on the new technology when it is new.
It doesn't sound like they've stopped investing in research in general. Just one specific area.
"We've been working on this for decades and can't figure out how to commercialize it, so we're going to try different things" is a healthy result, even if other companies got different results.
https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/samsung-teases-16-layer-3...