drkohler said:
The real question is: Where are the Chinese hiding the Zombies?
I mean, this virus outbreak has the exact plotline of every tv series currently showing or being made for US tv. A worldwide plague that instantly turns people into zombies is pretty much what we get from the studios nowadays.
As for the Bloomberg thingie: One line tells everything we need to know. In case you haven't noticed, it's the "memory prices went up" story line. Sony and MS have ordered their memories a long time ago. This stuff is ordered 1-3 years ahead of production start. The prices, delivery times, pretty much everything else were agreed upon at the time the contracts were signed and sealed. Those contracts are phonebook sized books that leave no interpretations (hoards of company lawyers make a living out of that). Let's not forget the first batches of memories are probably on the way to the fabs right now for production starts. Neither Sony nor MS cares a shit about what happened since with memory prices. If the prices had gone down, well, bad luck for Sony/MS . If the prices went up, well, bad luck for the fabs who get less money than they could have. That's the way mass manufacturing works. A fab will always prioritise a customer who can occupy a line at full capacity for a prolonged time. That is where the money is for a fab. It is an art for customers do fall in that cathegory with their orders to get good prices, and I'd guess both Sony and MS have ordered enough chips to be there.
If we had to speculate about things getting problematic (=more expensive), we could argue about the state of the SoCs. One more respin needed and the r&d bill would go up significantly.
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Often buyers will have written in to the contract that any cost savings made over the time of the contract are passed on, Sony and MS made sure of this after Nvidia continued to charge the same contract price making it hard for MS to use cost saving to cut the price, memory contracts I assume work a bit differently but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a contracted price that allows them to take advantage of any price drops with the contract price being a ceiling.
