SK hynix dethrones Samsung as world’s top DRAM maker

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-08-15/business/tech/Thanks-Nvidia-SK-hynix-dethrones-Samsung-as-worlds-top-DRAM-maker-for-first-time-in-over-30-years/2376834

by ksec • 11 months ago

188 78 11 months ago

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com

walterbell• 11 months ago

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.

Helpful footnote on man-machine boundary.

jchw2• 11 months ago

Tangentially: LLMs are really impressive at translation. I guess it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise given where a lot of the most pivotal research came from, but still, the leading edge LLMs are extremely good for situations where having a human translator is infeasible or too expensive, and if you're worried about correctness you can go through and verify the translation using reference material and asking the LLM for more information about a given excerpt, which you can also verify against references and online discussions.

I think my only concern is that I'm not sure how to make sure I'll always have an untainted set of reference material to check against in the post-LLM Internet. We've had LLM hallucinations result in software features. Are we possibly headed towards a world where LLM hallucinations occasionally reshape language and slang?

I feel bad for human translators right now. For various use cases, current-day machine translations and especially LLM translations are sufficient. For those not versed in the world of otaku and video game nerds, one extremely fascinating development of the last few years is the one-shot commission platform Skeb, where people can send various kinds of art commission requests to Japanese artists. They integrate with DeepL to support requests from people who don't speak Japanese fluently, and it seems to generally work very well. (The lower-stakes nature of one-shot art commissions helps a bit here too, but at the least I think communication issues are rarely a huge problem, which is pretty impressive.) And that kicked off before LLMs started to push machine translations even further.

seanmcdirmid5• 11 months ago

I was watching a graphic novel on YouTube yesterday that was translated from Japanese text into an English narration. It was weird, not perfect, probably copyright infringement, but pretty effective. I think it’s only a matter of time until we have real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling, or heck, working in another country where you don’t speak the local language. Language barriers are going to fall quickly.

qwertox• 11 months ago

LLMs are really impressive at translation.

I love it how one can mix languages in one sentence. "Anyway, re-add Tiefkühl and tell me to just check what they have there as TK-Gemüse, and a note at the end that I should go to EDEKA someday this or next week"

orthoxerox• 11 months ago

They are. For unlicensed fan translations of indie Japanese games the word "MTL" used to mean "unplayable translation quality" until maybe a year or two ago. Now ChatGPT can maintain enough context to translate the game mostly correctly. There are still cases when the names flip-flop between two plausible translations (e.g. Rina-Lina or "scroll of wisdom"-"sage scroll") or the gender is not inferred correctly, but they are rare enough that a single editor can crowdsource and apply the fixes. The prose itself is now finally legible and you don't feel like you're reading the clues to a cryptic crossword.

pjc502• 11 months ago

My wife has been working on translation recently, and the LLM hit rate for novels is highly variable. It's capable of just dropping out entire paragraphs. You still need a final pass from a human native speaker editor to check that it makes sense. Which is what's happening in this article, the news site cares enough about their brand and quality to check the output.

I agree that bidirectional communication is probably going to work a lot better, because people are more likely to be alert to the possibility of translation issues and can confirm understanding interactively.

thebruce87m• 11 months ago

That paragraph itself could be spat out by the LLM too. I’m not saying it is, but it’s a depressing thought.

Maybe in the future they will spit this out as a result of the training data today, e.g. this article.

anon-3988• 11 months ago

Does it matter? Lets say it is translated by a person. So what? Is he qualified? Does he know technology enough to translate the terminologies properly? How do I even verify this?

neom3• 11 months ago

Wonder if the reserved tables order in Apgujeong shifts too.

jacob_rezi• 11 months ago

I still reserve a couple every month. I live 2 blocks away

neom3• 11 months ago

I was referring to the fact that in Cheongdam many of the company man restaurants and clubs have a pecking order. Chey Tae-won now gets a better table? I wonder. :)

stogot• 11 months ago

I keep seeing this SK company’s brands everywhere. It’s a huge conglomerate, privately owned, that seems to be expanding rapidly and doing very well. Does anyone know why they’re so successful or is my misperception?

b473a• 11 months ago

They purchased Intel's entire NAND business a few years back, so they just kind of exploded into the SSD market. They sometimes sell their drives under the name Solidigm.

wtallis5• 11 months ago

I think SK Hynix's NAND business may have already been bigger than Intel's NAND business when they made that acquisition. Certainly by then SK Hynix had recovered from being late to the 3D NAND transition, while Intel was on a worse technological trajectory with their roadmap that diverged from the rest of the industry.

Your impression that they were at all new to the SSD market is largely due to the fact that SK Hynix operated mainly as a component supplier, and has never pursued promotion of their own retail SSD brand the way Samsung does. Hynix was a major player in the NAND industry before the SSD market as we know it even existed, and has been a major supplier of SSDs to PC OEMs for as long as PC OEMs have been buying SSDs in large volumes.

dv_dt• 11 months ago

Imho, if they're well managed, any private enterprise that is capitalized and has a long term outlook can run circles around public company management that can barely keep a year of marketing strategy consistent, let alone deep technical development.

ahartmetz• 11 months ago

Though, AFAICT, US public companies are the worst regarding financial short-term thinking. It's not as bad in other countries.

It is also possible to make the same mistakes for different reasons: lack of imagination, conservatism, entrenched interests...

WaxProlix• 11 months ago

They've been around in one form or another since the early 80s, and have been in and out of a few of the major chaebols in that time. I wouldn't call them privately owned in the western sense, necessarily. There's no institutional investment behind the chaebols themselves generally, they're 'owned' by a single family and passed down hereditarily, and are nationalistic in a certain sense; they're much more closely ingrained with both government and state identity than most western corps.

nerderloo• 11 months ago

They're not privately owned. Bunch of SK companies are publicly traded in Korean stock market, including fore mentioned SK Hynix KRX: 000660

numpad02• 11 months ago

Hasn't this been a common trope for past ~50 years? East Asian anything is at least within a few miles to American/European anything, but way cheaper thanks to USD dominance, and that situation renders non-Asian industrial fabrication pointless and unsustainable, and East Asian products win.

From Toyota cars to Sony TVs to TSMC chips to DJI drones. It's been that way for a while.

userbinator• 11 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Group

Note that "SK" does not stand for "South Korea", as one might be lead to believe.

vel0city• 11 months ago

SK Group is one of the big Korean chaebols. An important thing to understand when looking at South Korean politics and economics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

seanmcdirmid5• 11 months ago

Aren’t all South Korean conglomerates like that? Samsung, SK, LG, Lotte, … they have shocking broad business lines even if you just know them for something more narrow.

neom3• 11 months ago

Yes. You can technically drive Samsung branded cars, and live in LG built condo buildings.

butifnot0701• 11 months ago

As others have noted, SK is not private - although it's hard to say whether it's private or public as it's more of group of companies. But many of larger companies including Holding Co is private. The company in this article's context is SK Hynix which is second largest (or third?) on Korean exchange. Just like other conglomerates in this country, SK Group runs many other businesses including bio, finance, telecom, etc.

mathverse• 11 months ago

Korean conglomerates are focused on hard sciences and there is very little room to do anything else that's why they excel here. They hire from the best Ivy style schools in Korea and focus on cutting edge stuff or improving cutting edge manufacturing

Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates dont create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.

marcyb5st• 11 months ago

There is also to say that Chaebols (i.e. Korean conglomerates) can do basically whatever they want because the Korean government will bail them out/give them the financial support they need.

With this, the "I need to be extremely profitable" burden is somewhat lifted, giving them the freedom to do hard R&D.

And it is true now still, with the last bribery in exchange of favors dating back to 2018 [1]

[1] https://bruinpoliticalreview.org/articles?post-slug=south-ko...

jjani• 11 months ago

Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates don't create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.

What? Korea's software jobs per capita is one of the highest of all wealthy (let's say top 30 HDI) countries. Please stop claiming this sort of stuff without being familiar with the country.

downrightmike• 11 months ago

Can we just make 64GB the minimum now please

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y72• 11 months ago

Are there aggregations of some accessible telemetry from a widely used application that reveal what is most common today?

bcraven• 11 months ago

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho

cute_boi• 11 months ago

I asked my company to give me 32 GB RAM, then old boomer said why I need so much of RAM. They were asking whether I am building a rocket....

jlokier• 11 months ago

I've had that happen twice!

Recently I asked for my software developer colleage to be bought a 24 GB Macbook Air instead of 16 GB, and boss came back with "not everyone needs a super-big machine like yours Jamie!".

They seriously spent contractor time investigating whether 16 GB was "enough" to get by for our app development, for a price difference on one laptop (second hand) that was negligible compared with cost of my colleage's time.

When I was using 16 GB I regularly had to watch the spinning beachball waiting for tasks due to memory pressure. Between browsers and VMs, it was nowhere near enough for how I worked. So I knew why I was asking, and I knew the price difference was so small for the company, that it was a no-brainer. I gave justifications but it was seen as over-indulgent.

dlcarrier• 11 months ago

A rocket can run on 32 KB of RAM. It's web browsers that take all the RAM. (At least for normal users, that don't run neural networks locally.)

seanmcdirmid5• 11 months ago

64GB is what you need to run some decent quantized mid-sized LLMs locally…with unified memory on Apple silicon. Should be standard, that would open up a lot if new applications. Incidentally, even high DPI monitors aren’t standard yet for non-mobile devices. Sad how slowly things move.

xiconfjs• 11 months ago

Not for low power applications

GloriousKoji• 11 months ago

16GB has been the new minimum for under a year. Give it some more time /s

mgh2• 11 months ago

Video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840229

somat• 11 months ago

So who makes the best ram? or is it largely interchangeable.

Off the top of my head there is only like three manufacturers left. Micron being the only one not mentioned here.

wtallis5• 11 months ago

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the only three manufacturers doing leading-edge DRAM manufacturing, but there are other companies like Nanya that do older DRAM types and specialized DRAM parts for eg. embedded and industrial applications rather than PC, servers, and phones.

As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next, and also depends on what you consider "best": you might be looking for chips that overclock well in a desktop, or that are least likely to suffer compatibility issues and performance loss when maxing out the capacity in a desktop, or maybe "best" might mean who has the lowest-power LPDDR for your phone.

The DRAM parts made by the big three largely all adhere to the same standards (thought not necessarily all supporting the same frequencies), with the most significant recent example being GDDR6X that was essentially a NVIDIA-Micron exclusive partnership. For the most part, it's the latest iteration of DDR (desktops and servers), LPDDR (handhelds and low-power laptops), GDDR (GPUs), and HBM (more expensive GPUs).

dehrmann• 11 months ago

As for who makes the best RAM, it changes from one generation to the next

This reminds me of HDDs and SSDs, though I've always found RAM to be generally reliable or obviously bad, while storage can look ok for a while before it fails.

ksec2• 11 months ago

Just to add CXMT from China has been catching up as well. Although I don't believe they will be up to leading edge DRAM given the current state of things.

Cyph0n• 11 months ago

HBM is also used in NPUs (network processing units) to be able to buffer and process packets at line rate (e.g., 400 Gbps) in high end switches and routers.

pirocks• 11 months ago

My sibling comment has a lot of good info, but to answer your question for ddr5, SK Hynix makes the ram capable of the highest frequencies/best timings, Samsung is second and micron is third. At least this was true when ddr5 initially came out, these things could change. Its also worth mentioning that manufactures can have different grades/product lines so there is variation within a manufacturer to. My perception is that Micron and Samsung are cheaper than SK Hynix, though idk what wholesale prices actually look like.

Strom• 11 months ago

In addition to generation, there are also differences based on capacity. I know less about DDR5 specifics, but with DDR4 you had Micron having the best chips for 32GB dual-rank sticks, while Samsung had the best for smaller capacities.

noboostforyou• 11 months ago

The "best" depends on what you want. For example, with desktop memory the previous DDR4 gen Samsung's B-die was considered the top choice if you wanted the fastest speeds and highest overclocking potential. Micron's rev-e die was also desirable as it was usually dual rank (technically slower, but for certain real world applications you will get better performance) and also overclocked quite well.

Now with DDR5, Hynix's A-die is considered the best option.

Panzer043• 11 months ago

Dual rank was a lot faster in DDR4 days IIRC, because it allowed a memory channel to have more requests in-flight on the memory - it could be worth like +10% performance or more.

Less impactful in DDR5 because they made it a design goal to have more "ranks" by default, though it does still have a small performance benefit.

Panzer043• 11 months ago

SK Hynix is winning in DDR5 land - their memory performs significantly better in all respects compared to Micron and Samsung.

Whether that matters much is debateable - maybe they get higher yields as a result (since more chips are sufficiently performant to be useful) but JEDEC specs seem pretty generous relative to what you can achieve on consumer platforms, so I somewhat doubt much RAM is thrown out because it's too slow to meet spec.

It's pretty random, though. Back in DDR4 days Samsung produced the best memory (B-die) and it wasn't particularly close - near-DDR5 speeds with lower latencies. At the same time, some of their other dies (I guess from other fabs?) was absolutely awful.

Again, I don't know how much that translates into profit though, since the performance user market for RAM is probably a fraction of a fraction of the overall memory market.

thehumanmeat• 11 months ago

Slightly related, I've been wanting to invest in SK Hynix since early '23. Does anyone know how a US investor can get access to the stock? I haven't found any brokers that allow you to trade Korea Exchange tickers.

cherryteastain• 11 months ago

Interactive Brokers lets you trade HY9H and HXSCL which are secondary listings of SK Hynix on German and US exchanges respectively.

ajb• 11 months ago

I think it was Sophie Wilson who described the DRAM market as "a game of chicken with billions of dollars". Basically the market flip flops between glut and scarcity. When there are too many fabs, there is a glut and all the manufacturers grit their teeth and lose money, until one chickens out and closes a fab. Then prices go up and the ones still in the game make money, hand over fist, until too many fabs are built for the next generation of chips and the market flips back.

I haven't personally checked this against market data, FWIW.

ksec2• 11 months ago

That is correct. Even when we are only left with three DRAM foundry, all three were watching out whether one of them will build a new Fab. That has created an environment where no one wants to build it first unless they are absolutely sure, and when one will be built all other follows.

And that is the reason why TSMC said they will never go into the DRAM business.

SK hynix dethrones Samsung as world’s top DRAM maker

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