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posted by martyb on Friday June 11 2021, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the dram-of-cyber-libel dept.

SK Hynix admits to DRAM defects, smacks down rumour it botched big batches

South Korean chip maker SK Hynix has admitted some of its DRAM components included defects, though it says accounts of the issue are overblown.

[...] The impact of the defects may be less substantial than the damage done to SK Hynix's reputation, as South Korean newswire Yonhap reports that rumours have circulated to the effect that 240,000 wafers of DRAM are defective. SK Hynix is thought to have the capacity to produce around 1.8 million wafers a month, around 80 per cent of which are dedicated to DRAM. The whispering therefore describes a serious situation at a time the world's hunger for silicon can't be satiated.

SK Hynix's missive to The Register continued: "The scale of the potential losses mentioned in the rumour is absolutely not true and exaggerated."

The company has therefore requested a police investigation into whoever is spreading this gossip.

SK Hynix Admits to Some DRAM Production Flaws, Calls the Cops

SK Hynix admitted that, while it was dealing with some faulty DRAMs, the damages did not impact 240,000 wafers. The company claimed that these rumors are meant to injure its reputation and called the local police to file libel and misinformation charges against its unknown assailant, thus spurring a police investigation into the rumors.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:58AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:58AM (#1144193)

    The impact of the defects may be less substantial than the damage done to SK Hynix's reputation

    What reputation? They make chips. Some will be faulty. Most will not. They are not in reputation business. Opinions at 8pm and real news nowhere to be seen?

    Pump and dump rumors.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by noirmaru on Friday June 11 2021, @07:12AM

      by noirmaru (6701) on Friday June 11 2021, @07:12AM (#1144195)

      They are a publicly traded company, therefore they are in the reputation business.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday June 11 2021, @07:56AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday June 11 2021, @07:56AM (#1144199) Journal

      Unless you have a monopoly, your reputation concerning the quality of your products matters a lot.

      Think about it: Imagine you want to buy something, and there's one vendor who has the reputation of producing quality, and another that has the reputation of producing crap. Let's further assume that the offerings of both companies are otherwise equivalent. Now, from which vendor will you more likely buy?

      Moreover, even if the products are actually of the same quality and you know it, if you use them as part of a product you are going to sell yourself, you may not be able to afford buying from the company with bad reputation, as that might affect your own reputation (“oh, they put crap in their products, thus their products must be crap”).

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @03:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @03:30PM (#1144263)

      What reputation? They make chips. Some will be faulty. Most will not.

      And if more DRAM was ECC, it would matter even less.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday June 11 2021, @09:40AM (1 child)

    by crafoo (6639) on Friday June 11 2021, @09:40AM (#1144204)

    This is exactly what libel laws are for. Good for them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:06PM (#1144324)

      Are they?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @04:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @04:51PM (#1144289)

    This must be where Cisco is sourcing their server memory from...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @04:53PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @04:53PM (#1144290)

    In the past when a RAM stick was bad it just wouldn't boot = no problem because you know it's a dud, send it back. So what's the big deal? Can a bad RAM stick silently corrupt your data/programs without crashing?

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:09PM (#1144325)

      Yes, it can. Data is in the memory too.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @02:54AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @02:54AM (#1144474)

      Yup, it absolutely can, and it's happened to me when one of my two sticks of RAM went bad. I was running a bunch of Matlab simulations. Everything worked fine until my data sets got beyond a certain size, at which point the simulation would throw really bizarre errors - as in, Matlab wouldn't actually crash, but would throw error messages that should have been mathematically impossible, based on what I was asking it to do. After spending several futile hours trying to debug my code, I ram a memory test, and it found problems with my second DDR module. It turned out my simulations were getting messed up when they started to get large enough to need to put data in that part of RAM. After I replaced it, my simulations worked fine.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @09:14PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @09:14PM (#1144688)

        Shit. Better do a memtest. I buy the cheapest Chinese non-EEC garbage I can find.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @09:48PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @09:48PM (#1144693)

        Shit. Where is memtest?! Looks like it stopped working with UEFI. What the fuck are we supposed to do now, Linus?

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday June 12 2021, @03:03AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Saturday June 12 2021, @03:03AM (#1144477) Homepage

      Yes. My old 286 has a bad RAM chip. This manifested two ways:

      -- crash when WordPerfect was asked to select a font.
      -- random character substitution in my BBS message editor (plain text).

      After I locked out the affected memory address, both problems stopped.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
  • (Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Sunday June 13 2021, @12:47AM (1 child)

    by sonamchauhan (6546) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 13 2021, @12:47AM (#1144720)

    A manager once insulted my nationality, claiming the dodgy RAM I had found was made in my country.

    The manager was Korean, and the RAM was Hynix.

    • (Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Sunday June 13 2021, @12:58AM

      by sonamchauhan (6546) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 13 2021, @12:58AM (#1144722)

      Maybe "insulted" is too strong a term. Let's go with "poked fun at".

      Then when I pointed out the "Hynix" branding on the faulty module, he didn't know what it meant. I had to explain it was 'Hyundai RAM' (made by a group company of the Hyundai chaebol).

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