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Thanks Mule for a excellent article! I have worked in storage industry for 10+ years designing NAND and various SSD based products. It was delightful to read a industry level article here.

My 2 cents, on comments below. I would not worry about Optane too much ( have spend many years on it). To me it is a great science project, but when it comes to TCO or Dollar cost it is just going to be a solution for any hyperscalers.

One area to watch is CXL, this interface will enable companies like Micron to designer a cheaper DRAM and put it on a PCIe interface (sorry if this sounds too nerdy). And this will be a nail on coffin to some projects like Optane in long run. Plus, I have no hopes on Intel doing anything right given their sell of memory business to SK and merging Optane to their DataCenter. For a second, one can imagine if I am the VP of the datacenter group, where would I put Optane in the things of problem I need to fix.....geez I guess would be pretty last for me given all the other woes :).

Noob questions,

1. In the excel snapshots of companies, what does Weight % mean?

2. Any key non-USA tech companies you like other than Lam Research there? Specially looking to the ones who will be supplying to China?

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What do you think of HSMC failing and Tsinghua defaulting (YMTC parent)? Also another memory question; we've started seeing stuff like Optane actually go into racks. It populates channels where DIMMs would be but serves a function between memory ranks - do you think it materially cannibalizes DRAM this cycle?

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