Posted by
emmett
on from the do-you-suffer-from-long-term-memory-loss dept.
CitizenC writes: "ACK! According to this C|Net story, RAM prices are expected to go up again this week, due to the low supply and high demand. Buy your RAM now!"
Stayed 2 years behind the "curve" is the only way to do powerfull computing at a reasonable price. ___
OT: .10 really *is* a lot of money...
by
Guppy
·
· Score: 2
"This is what we freak out about now? This is a sad sad day..."
Ten cents is a huge amount of money. Geeze, doesn't anyone remember the tortured screams last time gasoline prices went up.10 in the US? "Give us cheap gas for our gigantic three-ton SUVs, you greedy OPEC bastards!" Dangit, they could have wrecked our economy, and then how would we afford our Ford Expeditions and GM Yukons?
Re:OT: .10 really *is* a lot of money...
by
the+eric+conspiracy
·
· Score: 2
Geeze, doesn't anyone remember the tortured screams last time gasoline prices went up.10 in the US?
Give me a break. Gas prices are DOUBLE what they were a year ago, and it hurst, not only at the pump, but when the home heating bill comes in, too, or when you see that fuel surcharge on the electric bill.
how would we afford our Ford Expeditions and GM Yukons
I have no sympathy for land yacht owners, of which I am not one.
I'm not convinced that these RAM price fluctuations are for real. Remember when that plastic factory in Korea burned down a few years back? It was immediately reported that RAM prices would skyrocket, because this was just 1 of 2 factories in the world that made this particular type of plastic for RAM.
Then, about a month later, some interesting articles appeared. Just a few. (This was pre-web-journalism, for the most part, so I can't find anything to link to.) The reports were that the amount of plastic that was in warehouses was unbelievable. There was enough for years of RAM, more than enough time to rebuild the factory and replenish the stocks. Further, this other factory in the world was fully capable of producing enough plastic to satisfy the world's demand. (If anybody has a more accurate recollection of this than I, please correct my errors.)
Yet, still, the industry continued to insist that the price would go up, which it did. Smacked of price-fixing to me, like oil from the mid-east.
It's kinda sneaky everytime something like this happens. When Coca-Cola demand goes up, the price doesn't increase. When carpet demand goes up, the price doesn't increase. Yet somehow we're to believe that the RAM industry is so grossly incompetent as to be unable to adequate predict the demand for their sole product more than a month in advance?
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it seems weird to me.
When Coca-Cola demand goes up, the price doesn't increase. When carpet demand goes up, the price doesn't increase. Yet somehow we're to believe that the RAM industry is so grossly incompetent as to be unable to adequate predict the demand for their sole product more than a month in advance?
They don't call it "supply and demand" for nothing.
In the case of Coke and Carpets there is an ample supply of both, so both are cheap regardless of demand. If demand goes up it's easy to increase production by hiring more workers and buying more raw materials.
With RAM chips the supply is (supposedly) not ample. Demand fluctuates. Increasing production to meet demand requires building or converting a fab. Ramping up production to meet demand takes a while, during which time prices are high.
Well, almost all of the costs involved in making memory are fixed costs, so overcapacity is very expensive. I would have thought that memory prices were pretty elastic though: most peoples approach to buying computers seems to be `memory's so cheap so I may as well have a 128MB machine, even though I don't really need it'. People will just buy the 64MB machines and wait 'til they need it to buy the upgrade.
Just be thankful you have SDRAM and not an old machine with EDO (or fast page). The prices are double, and they go in machines that are worthless. Oh, the irony.
My guess is that they meant 64Mb, because 64Mb for $6 would be 64MB for around $48, which is much more plausible than believing that consumers are paying a 1200% markup.
-- My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
High SDRAM prices are bad for Rambus
by
Guppy
·
· Score: 5
On the surface, it sounds like a SDRAM price hike would be good for RDRAM, as it would close (slightly) the price gap between the two sorts of memory. In reality, though, this is bad for Rambus. There are plenty of other issues with Rambus (die size, yield, packaging, royalties, etc...), but the biggest one in simple economics.
A year or two ago, the big carrot that Rambus had to offer to manufacturers was a potentially profitable product. SDRAM prices were in the dumps, so nobody was making any money no matter how much they could churn out. Fast forward to present day, and just about every fab is guaranteed a nice fat profit, just for producing a commodity chip. The only way to justify the risk and cost of switching production from SDRAM to RDRAM is if RDRAM fetches a huge margin. Hence low supplies and sky-high prices for Rambus.
Intel has been pushing manufacturers to "voluntarily" cut their margins and drop prices on RDRAM. For once, though, it seems the memory makers have the upper hand, and there have been no takers so far.
If the contract price for a stick of 64M PC100 SDRAM is $6,
The article said 64 MB chip; I am sure they meant a 64 Mb chip, of which it takes 8 to make a 64 MB DIMM.
A few coments on this one...
by
seebs
·
· Score: 2
First off, that sure sounds like they mean megabits, not megabytes.
Anyway, I think this story is patent bullshit. RAM prices do not increase over time, except for brief spikes. In general, given a time T, at T+6 months, RAM will cost less. Maybe not always, but pretty often.
Every time there's a glut, even a brief one, more people decide to play. There are plenty of companies that can make chips; if prices start getting high, more of them come in.
Might RAM prices go up for a little while? Sure. I don't expect them to stay up, and I don't think people should worry much. They're still going to be cheap compared to a while back...
-- My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Re:$0.10 more a stick? Try $0.10 more a chip.
by
jonnythan
·
· Score: 2
16 to make a 256 MB DIMM? 64Mb / 8 = 8 MB. That means _32_ to make a 256 MB DIMM, and I have yet to see a DIMM with 32 chips. Expect the price increase for the 256 MB DIMM to be a little greater than you predicted.
Re:Wow do you need to learn how to shop!
by
generic-man
·
· Score: 2
Just a quick glance at pricewatch shows 64MB pc100 sticks as low as $35.
Pricewatch may be a decent price searching site, but you should never trust the lowest price (or any price within the first page, for that matter). Oddly enough, all of those really low prices come from Back-Of-The-Truck Enterprises, Inc., based in scenic Crown Heights, NY.
Decent RAM might not be $126/64MB, but don't believe every price you see.
-- For more information, click here.
High demand fueled by these rumors
by
gklyber
·
· Score: 5
Of course, with articles like this, everyone will go out and buy RAM. There may be high demand right now, but these rumors will make demand skyrocket and make the prices even higher. Somebody at C|Net must want their memory stock to improve in value.
Re:High demand fueled by these rumors
by
Betcour
·
· Score: 4
Out of the last 5 RAM price hike, the IT press has successfully predicted 47 of them.
The key to success in today's volatile market is maintaining a diverse portfolio. A mix of high-risk stocks, blue chips, RAM chips and bonds maximizes potential while guaranteeing long term value.
...and here I am with my money tied up in pumpkins. D'oh!
Contract prices for the standard 64-MB chip, now at $6, will rise about a dime
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dime only a few cents? So this isn't like the doubling in price which happened last September.
--
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Re:Only up by 1 dime / 64 MB
by
stripes
·
· Score: 2
Part of the reason is technological; a troy ounce of gold is, was, and forever shall be the same thing; same goes for a bushel of wheat or most other commodities. But memory technology is changing very fast; a 1 meg SIMM might have looked like a really good benchmark at one time, but certainly not now. In that sense, RAM is a very strange commodity
I can see how this would make for a lot of diffrent futures symbols, but not that it is an impossable obsticle. Of corse I would pay a diffrent ammount for PC133 64MBit 7-1-1-1 Jan2001 options then i would for DDR PC200 128Mbit 12-1-1-1 Jan2001 options. And of corse I probbably wouldn't pay much at all for any 2004 options as I think we'll be off to a new technology. but I think the diffrences are easally quantifyed, and most of the boilerplate (delevered to X, loose parts/finished sticks, acceptable defect rate, transaction rules) can remian the same. After all a share of WCOM now is vastly diffrent from a share of WCOM four years ago, yet it is traded on CBOE. A share of UUNT is no longer available, but it was once traded on the CBOE. There is a chance that AWE shares will be swollowd back into T shares, yet they trade on the CBOE.
I'm with you on the other oddamints. I hadn't thought of them. Well with the possable execption of large consumers. I would think this would help them even more. Then again it would also help the small consumers a whole lot, which the large ones might not like. I think most of all that like wheat futures, DRAM futures would help DRAM producers.
Re:Only up by 1 dime / 64 MB
by
stripes
·
· Score: 2
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dime only a few cents? So this isn't like the doubling in price which happened last September.
Yep, next weeks price increse is only ten cents a 1.6% price hike.
The article seems to think the demand will continue (or rise), and that Micron has additonal idle production capacity, but pretty much nobody else does (they could switch back to DRAM from FLASH, if DRAM becomes more profitable then FLASH again, incresing hte price of FLASH of corse).
If it is right then we are in for more price hikes. How many or how much is, of corse, pretyt much unknown. If anyone could tell for sure they could make a huge amount of money from buying and selling futures on RAM. Hmmm, I can't find DRAM futures at CBOE (which has other futures and options), anyone know where they might be?
In other words this is the begining. Possably the begining of nothing. Possably the begining of a huge increse. Probbably merely something in between.
Re:Only up by 1 dime / 64 MB
by
ZanshinWedge
·
· Score: 2
It's a term derived from the English language.
Contract = a contract (I would guess, probably, to buy RAM, though goats may or may not be involved)
Price = the actually monetary payment in exchange for the RAM (in the modern world, we use "money" to trade for goods and services, such as RAM).
So, if a big company (like say Dell), buys a huge block of RAM from a memory company (like say Micron) then they will have a contract and thus pay the "contract price" for said large quantity of RAM.
</condescending tone>
Re:Only up by 1 dime / 64 MB
by
King+Babar
·
· Score: 2
If anyone could tell for sure they could make a huge amount of money from buying and selling futures on RAM. Hmmm, I can't find DRAM futures at CBOE (which has other futures and options), anyone know where they might be?
I know that open futures and options markets in DRAM have been contemplated on several occasions, but I don't believe there are any "real" ones, yet. Part of the reason is technological; a troy ounce of gold is, was, and forever shall be the same thing; same goes for a bushel of wheat or most other commodities. But memory technology is changing very fast; a 1 meg SIMM might have looked like a really good benchmark at one time, but certainly not now. In that sense, RAM is a very strange commodity, and an exceedingly risky one; RAMBUS memory futures, anyone?
Other oddities include the facts that RAM markets have a relatively large proportion of foreign corporatoins involved, and that they have proven to be really easily manipulated in the past.
But one of the biggest factors behind a lack of RAM-based securities might be the simple point that large consumers of RAM, unlike large consumers in many other industries, can and do make huge contracts directly with producers (which can be themselves!), and this might reduce the need for then to do hedging in the markets.
--
Babar
Relax, don't do it, when you wanna go to it
by
Money__
·
· Score: 2
Keep in mind that this story reports on the analysis of just one, allbeit the largest, DRAM company, Micron Technology. There will be oportinity for other DRAM mfg. to get production into place to try and meet demand.
From the article: Contract prices for the standard 64-MB chip, now at $6, will rise about a dime, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Eric Ross said. Micron's inventory has been halved to two to three weeks worth from six to seven weeks in March, he said.
This is hardly a panic in the market and will only serve as a window to other lower cost fabs to grab some share from Micron. ___
Yeah! Buy your ram now!
by
Ron+Harwood
·
· Score: 2
Make sure that you drive up demand and decrease the supply so they can jack up the price more!
$0.10 more a stick? Try $0.10 more a chip.
by
Marcus+Aanerud
·
· Score: 4
I think the article is confusing "MB" and "Mb". Megabytes is what we typically measure our computer storage in. Megabits is what chip vendors measure the individual chips by. 8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte. What's that mean? If the price of a 64Mb chip is $6, you need 16 of those chips to make a 256MB DIMM, and 8 of them to make a 64MB DIMM. That's $96 for the actual RAM chips on a 256MB DIMM, and $48 for the chips that go on a 64MB DIMM. That sounds a lot more realistic.
So, if there's a price hike from $6 to $6.10, the cost of the 256MB module is now $97.60. Up $1.60. Not too big of a deal until you consider markups, profit margins, and hype-stories like the one on c|net. If people see that story, they're bound to believe it, and rest assured, the good resellers are going to be reading articles that concern them (like this one).
And, of course, you need to add to the price of the RAM chips assembly of the actual DIMM, the circuit board that the chips are put on, testing of the board, distribution, further markups in retail, and so on. All together, that maks a 256MB module about $200-$270, depending where you buy.
May I suggest the RAM price index:
by
Wakko+Warner
·
· Score: 4
Go here to see if prices really do go up. This page tracks and graphs the prices of CPU, SDRAM, and RDRAM and has done so for a couple of years now. Very interesting site.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
-- "Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It really depends on how new/old your machine is. I have found that memory prices for previous-generation non-peecees have been very stable compared with peecee memory prices. When peecee DRAM prices tripled last year, memory for my Sparc 20 stayed exactly the same price - quite a bit lower than peecee memory in fact. So I think it really depends on whether your memory is the same stuff peecees use. If it is, prices will fluctuate. Otherwise they'll probably be stable. It also depends very much on where you get your memory. If you get it new from the workstation vendor it will be much more expensive than third-party and/or used memory. Whether this matters depends on whether you have a service contract.:)
I have a couple thoughts that probably aren't going to jibe with the rest of the (more market-related) comments, so I'm starting a new thread.
Does anyone know why the fabs for the higher density modules (i.e. 256 and 512 Mb) are taking so long to come online? I can get 256 MB modules at a price premium, but they seem to be taking their time getting to market. I have yet to see a consumer box ship with a single 256 MB chip, as opposed to two 128's which I see all the time.
Doesn't Moore's Law apply to memory fabrication as well as processor fabs? When the graphics chipset makers like nVidia are able to cut the product cycles time to 6-12 months, instead of 12-18, as Moore predicted so famously, why is there such a holdup in the memory market? Is it because memory isn't quite as glamorous and, dare I say, sexy as graphics or CPUs?
Anyway, what would be ideal would be to see a few high density fabs come online and start pushing out the 256 and 512 MB modules. Otherwise, we're going to keep getting whiplash trying to track the prices of 128 MB SDRAM.
Why this hasn't happened (Taiwan earthquake? Poor market analysis?) yet is beyond me.
Uh - "skyrocket" you say?
by
-Harlequin-
·
· Score: 2
"Prices expected to skyrocket this week" claims the heading. The C/net article tells a different story. A 2% base price rise, while it may be the start of a bigger trend, doesn't seem as PaNiC!!!-worthy as the headline suggests.
Ok, I don't know anything about the downstream effects this is going to have, and it does sound like the start of something bigger that will eventually result in much higher prices, but it is definitely yet another of the horde of indicators showing that/. could do with a lot less sensationalism in its journalism.
Your standard 64MB Chip costs $6.00 from Micron. That price is going up about 10 cents. The consumer purchases a 64MB chip for about $126.00. (Based on Simple 64MB EDO 168-pin DIMM)
Now, $6.00 goes into $126.00 21 times. Take $.10 and multiply it by 21, and you get $2.10.
So in a worst-case scenario (being the company charges you DOUBLE the increase in price) the price of a 64MB DIMM from Simple Technology goes from $126.00 to $130.20. I'd hardly call that skyrocketing. Even if you pay QUADRUPLE the price increase, it's still under $10 more.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
--
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.:P)
Stacker didn't slow your machine down
by
divec
·
· Score: 2
Well, not if it was a typical 386SX or better. The time it took to do the decompression was typically less than the time it saved by not having to read as much from the disk. This was true for hard disks, but particularly true for floppies. I only stopped using the floppy "stacker anywhere" compression when I switched to Linux.
BTW I have known of memory compression being used to get round physical limits. E.g. ymight want to keep more than 2G of data in memory w/o swapping, on a system that supports only 2G physical memory.
--
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Emmetts definition of 'Skyrocket'
by
Money__
·
· Score: 2
Recently, our beloved Emmett was buying a Britney Spears CD single at the record store and he had only $6. When he found the price had gone up a dime (and he was forced to take 10 pennies from the 'have a penny leave a penny' tray) Emmet was heard to say "These prices are Skyrocketing!"
Later, that same afternoon, while cruising in his AMC pacer with Britney pounding through the sub woofers, our beloved Emmett rolled through the drive through for a super size number 6 with an extra order of fries and noticed that the price had gone up from 6 to 6.10, Emmett was heard to say, "These prices are Skyrocketing!"
;) ___
Obligatory prediction poll
by
PollMastah
·
· Score: 3
What is the most likely Slashdot article to appear next?
Yet Another Fiasco involving Napster
Yet Another {DMCA, RIAA, UCITA, insert-your-favorite-enemy} bashing session.
Famous Person X (or not-so-famous person X) writes something inflammatory about {Napster, Open Source, Linux, GPL}. News site gets slashdotted, Slashdot gets filled with zealot posts.
You can run your Linux box off potatoes! Serious!
RAM prices are dropping! Run for cover! CPU prices are rising! Ride the tide!
Scientists have discovered Yet Another Innovation! Rabid slashdotters rush to post uninformed, nonsensical posts that get modded up to +5!
Hemos re-posts something redundant! Addicted slashdotters complain that slashdot isn't reading itself, but they're too hooked to find a better site!
Slashdot posts a movie review. Sane slashdotters complain that the movie sucks. Insane slashdotters elaborately explain why Natalie Portman is hotter than the lead actress.
--
Poll Mastah
Re:Obligatory prediction poll
by
swinge
·
· Score: 4
Addicted slashdotters complain...
9. carefully constructed parody of slashdot appears and gets moderated up, ostensibly making fun of slashdot but clearly mired in it, simultaneously complaining about yet adding to the noise.
slashdot would be better if we ditched all the emotion. Emotion is stuff that does not matter.
Nothing makes prices skyrocket like panic buying
by
redelm
·
· Score: 5
C'mon/. , you're playing right into the hands of the DRAM mfrs. They don't like the current low prices and have lost a bundle on Rambus. So they're taking this low-profit time to do some maintenance/retooling on some fabs. Perfectly normal.
They've also got lots of chips in inventories to meet sales. A plant fire when demand is tight is one thing, but a planned shutdown when demand is slack is quite another.
But starting a buying panic is very much in their interest. CNet bought the story, hook-line&sinker. Now you. Fortunately, the hobbyist market is fairly small, and I doubt can move prices. The big OEMs (Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM) are smarter than to fall for this.
It's fairly obvious that prices are not 'skyrocketing'. But if they did, as happened last year, and stayed high, what would happen?
When software was just beginning to get bloated (I remember being shocked that CorelDraw required a massive 20Mbyte), it became expensive to get a large enough hard disk (80Mbyte or so). Disk prices, at least at first, didn't drop enough for consumers to keep up with the increased demand for disk space. This led to a brief period of disk compression programs such as Stacker, which slowed down your machine a little but let you fit about 60% more stuff on your disk (typically). Eventually {Double,Drive}Space was included as a standard feature of MS-DOS (and then Win95). But now that disks are so cheap, I doubt if anyone bothers with it on a new system.
Similarly, a couple of years later, starting just before the launch of Win95, it started getting expensive to fit a system with the amount of RAM needed to run modern bloated applications. Products such as RAM Doubler appeared for the PC and Mac. (The PC version of one such program turned out to be a total fraud - it didn't compress things at all - but the others did actually do something.) In common with the disk compressors, the 'Double' in the name is misleading; you don't get anywhere near the same performance as a system with twice the RAM.
The way these RAM compressors (or at least Quarterdeck's offering) work is to set aside an area of memory, say 25% of physical RAM, for compressed pages. When the remaining memory gets full, pages are compressed and stored in the buffer instead of being paged to disk. When the buffer gets full you do have to go to disk, but you can write compressed pages and several of them at once, so disk activity is less. Compressing the pages takes CPU time, but most PCs have fast CPU relative to disk speed so the speed burden isn't too great.
Having said that, I didn't notice any wonderful speedup from Quarterdeck's RAM booster (can't remember the name) on a 16Mbyte machine, and it made Windows less stable. But done right, it might work.
Could you do something similar for Linux? One tactic might be to create a RAM disk with some of your memory, and use something like the crusty old DoUbLe (or however it's spelt) code to make it a 'compressed partition'. Then get Linux to swap to that before going to disk.
However you wouldn't get the benefit of pages being compressed when they go to disk, nor of compressed pages being simply moved from the RAM-swap to the swap partition. AFAIK you can tell Linux to use one swap device in preference to another, but you can't ask for a tiered swap scheme where pages from one device spill onto the next. (Please correct me if I am wrong.)
Another problem is that with DoUbLe, the size of the device varies according to how well things have compressed so far, and swapping requires a fixed-size device. So none of this would probably work at all.
But there are plenty of ultra-fast compression algorithms out there (LZO is fast and GPLed) which you might stick in the kernel. Then get the kernel to compress pages and dump them in a big pile somewhere, and to swap them out only when there is no alternative (or when the system is idle).
I have no idea whether such a scheme would make a significant difference; I'd guess that many of the most bloated programs do have highly compressible data areas though. If it did work, then Linux would be able to survive a memory shortage better than other OSes. It might also help ultra-cheapskate manufacturers making thin clients or mobile devices.
Everytime people at work want faster machines, they ask "can't we just put more ram in it?".. I have to explain that doubling the ram in that p100 running win95 is just not going to double their performance..
That said, I have one reason to use over 128 megs of ram -AfterEffects. I use AfterEffects daily, and it uses a 'ram preview' function that stores as much of your video comp in a ram buffer as possible, then lets you view it playing back smoothly with sound - This is such an important tool to me at work, my G3 there has 768 megs. (this also lets me be lazy about running multiple apps at the same time). -
Raytracing isn't the big RAM eater - the modelling is. I have 320MB in my P2 (and 512 in my Alpha, but that's purely "because I can", I never use anywhere near all of it:-) Anyway, the 320MB in my P2 gets used up routinely when I'm doing 3D work (take a look at this picture for an example of one that used the full 320 and then some virtual memory as well.) This is using 3D Studio and Bryce 4, not Povray, which needs far less RAM.
On a related note, whose fucking bright idea was it to put only 3 RAM slots in my damn motherboard instead of 4 like it should? I would *love* to put some of the RAM from my ALpha into my P2 and actually put it to use. --
Slashdot Mirror
Stayed 2 years behind the "curve" is the only way to do powerfull computing at a reasonable price.
___
"This is what we freak out about now? This is a sad sad day..."
.10 in the US? "Give us cheap gas for our gigantic three-ton SUVs, you greedy OPEC bastards!" Dangit, they could have wrecked our economy, and then how would we afford our Ford Expeditions and GM Yukons?
Ten cents is a huge amount of money. Geeze, doesn't anyone remember the tortured screams last time gasoline prices went up
I'm not convinced that these RAM price fluctuations are for real. Remember when that plastic factory in Korea burned down a few years back? It was immediately reported that RAM prices would skyrocket, because this was just 1 of 2 factories in the world that made this particular type of plastic for RAM.
Then, about a month later, some interesting articles appeared. Just a few. (This was pre-web-journalism, for the most part, so I can't find anything to link to.) The reports were that the amount of plastic that was in warehouses was unbelievable. There was enough for years of RAM, more than enough time to rebuild the factory and replenish the stocks. Further, this other factory in the world was fully capable of producing enough plastic to satisfy the world's demand. (If anybody has a more accurate recollection of this than I, please correct my errors.)
Yet, still, the industry continued to insist that the price would go up, which it did. Smacked of price-fixing to me, like oil from the mid-east.
It's kinda sneaky everytime something like this happens. When Coca-Cola demand goes up, the price doesn't increase. When carpet demand goes up, the price doesn't increase. Yet somehow we're to believe that the RAM industry is so grossly incompetent as to be unable to adequate predict the demand for their sole product more than a month in advance?
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it seems weird to me.
-Waldo
Just be thankful you have SDRAM and not an old machine with EDO (or fast page). The prices are double, and they go in machines that are worthless. Oh, the irony.
My guess is that they meant 64Mb, because 64Mb for $6 would be 64MB for around $48, which is much more plausible than believing that consumers are paying a 1200% markup.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
On the surface, it sounds like a SDRAM price hike would be good for RDRAM, as it would close (slightly) the price gap between the two sorts of memory. In reality, though, this is bad for Rambus. There are plenty of other issues with Rambus (die size, yield, packaging, royalties, etc...), but the biggest one in simple economics.
A year or two ago, the big carrot that Rambus had to offer to manufacturers was a potentially profitable product. SDRAM prices were in the dumps, so nobody was making any money no matter how much they could churn out. Fast forward to present day, and just about every fab is guaranteed a nice fat profit, just for producing a commodity chip. The only way to justify the risk and cost of switching production from SDRAM to RDRAM is if RDRAM fetches a huge margin. Hence low supplies and sky-high prices for Rambus.
Intel has been pushing manufacturers to "voluntarily" cut their margins and drop prices on RDRAM. For once, though, it seems the memory makers have the upper hand, and there have been no takers so far.
i wonder if there is a relationship between the quality of someones code, and the price of memory.
As price of memory decreases, the motivation to do implement good memory management decreases, thus quality of code decreases.
just my 2c.
If the contract price for a stick of 64M PC100 SDRAM is $6,
The article said 64 MB chip; I am sure they meant a 64 Mb chip, of which it takes 8 to make a 64 MB DIMM.
First off, that sure sounds like they mean megabits, not megabytes.
Anyway, I think this story is patent bullshit. RAM prices do not increase over time, except for brief spikes. In general, given a time T, at T+6 months, RAM will cost less. Maybe not always, but pretty often.
Every time there's a glut, even a brief one, more people decide to play. There are plenty of companies that can make chips; if prices start getting high, more of them come in.
Might RAM prices go up for a little while? Sure. I don't expect them to stay up, and I don't think people should worry much. They're still going to be cheap compared to a while back...
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
16 to make a 256 MB DIMM? 64Mb / 8 = 8 MB. That means _32_ to make a 256 MB DIMM, and I have yet to see a DIMM with 32 chips. Expect the price increase for the 256 MB DIMM to be a little greater than you predicted.
Just a quick glance at pricewatch shows 64MB pc100 sticks as low as $35.
Pricewatch may be a decent price searching site, but you should never trust the lowest price (or any price within the first page, for that matter). Oddly enough, all of those really low prices come from Back-Of-The-Truck Enterprises, Inc., based in scenic Crown Heights, NY.
Decent RAM might not be $126/64MB, but don't believe every price you see.
For more information, click here.
Of course, with articles like this, everyone will go out and buy RAM. There may be high demand right now, but these rumors will make demand skyrocket and make the prices even higher.
Somebody at C|Net must want their memory stock to improve in value.
Drinking will help us plan!
The semiconductor industry is about to be slashdotted!
lucky i stashed all ram into my y2k bunker...
i knew it would come in handy sooner or later.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dime only a few cents? So this isn't like the doubling in price which happened last September.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
From the article:
Contract prices for the standard 64-MB chip, now at $6, will rise about a dime, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Eric Ross said. Micron's inventory has been halved to two to three weeks worth from six to seven weeks in March, he said.
This is hardly a panic in the market and will only serve as a window to other lower cost fabs to grab some share from Micron.
___
Make sure that you drive up demand and decrease the supply so they can jack up the price more!
Or you could be patient and wait things out.
BlackNova Traders
I think the article is confusing "MB" and "Mb". Megabytes is what we typically measure our computer storage in. Megabits is what chip vendors measure the individual chips by. 8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte. What's that mean? If the price of a 64Mb chip is $6, you need 16 of those chips to make a 256MB DIMM, and 8 of them to make a 64MB DIMM. That's $96 for the actual RAM chips on a 256MB DIMM, and $48 for the chips that go on a 64MB DIMM. That sounds a lot more realistic.
So, if there's a price hike from $6 to $6.10, the cost of the 256MB module is now $97.60. Up $1.60. Not too big of a deal until you consider markups, profit margins, and hype-stories like the one on c|net. If people see that story, they're bound to believe it, and rest assured, the good resellers are going to be reading articles that concern them (like this one).
And, of course, you need to add to the price of the RAM chips assembly of the actual DIMM, the circuit board that the chips are put on, testing of the board, distribution, further markups in retail, and so on. All together, that maks a 256MB module about $200-$270, depending where you buy.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It really depends on how new/old your machine is. I have found that memory prices for previous-generation non-peecees have been very stable compared with peecee memory prices. When peecee DRAM prices tripled last year, memory for my Sparc 20 stayed exactly the same price - quite a bit lower than peecee memory in fact. So I think it really depends on whether your memory is the same stuff peecees use. If it is, prices will fluctuate. Otherwise they'll probably be stable. It also depends very much on where you get your memory. If you get it new from the workstation vendor it will be much more expensive than third-party and/or used memory. Whether this matters depends on whether you have a service contract. :)
Does anyone know why the fabs for the higher density modules (i.e. 256 and 512 Mb) are taking so long to come online? I can get 256 MB modules at a price premium, but they seem to be taking their time getting to market. I have yet to see a consumer box ship with a single 256 MB chip, as opposed to two 128's which I see all the time.
Doesn't Moore's Law apply to memory fabrication as well as processor fabs? When the graphics chipset makers like nVidia are able to cut the product cycles time to 6-12 months, instead of 12-18, as Moore predicted so famously, why is there such a holdup in the memory market? Is it because memory isn't quite as glamorous and, dare I say, sexy as graphics or CPUs?
Anyway, what would be ideal would be to see a few high density fabs come online and start pushing out the 256 and 512 MB modules. Otherwise, we're going to keep getting whiplash trying to track the prices of 128 MB SDRAM.
Why this hasn't happened (Taiwan earthquake? Poor market analysis?) yet is beyond me.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
"Prices expected to skyrocket this week" claims the heading. The C/net article tells a different story. A 2% base price rise, while it may be the start of a bigger trend, doesn't seem as PaNiC!!!-worthy as the headline suggests.
/. could do with a lot less sensationalism in its journalism.
Ok, I don't know anything about the downstream effects this is going to have, and it does sound like the start of something bigger that will eventually result in much higher prices, but it is definitely yet another of the horde of indicators showing that
Your standard 64MB Chip costs $6.00 from Micron. That price is going up about 10 cents. The consumer purchases a 64MB chip for about $126.00. (Based on Simple 64MB EDO 168-pin DIMM)
Now, $6.00 goes into $126.00 21 times. Take $.10 and multiply it by 21, and you get $2.10.
So in a worst-case scenario (being the company charges you DOUBLE the increase in price) the price of a 64MB DIMM from Simple Technology goes from $126.00 to $130.20. I'd hardly call that skyrocketing. Even if you pay QUADRUPLE the price increase, it's still under $10 more.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Well, not if it was a typical 386SX or better. The time it took to do the decompression was typically less than the time it saved by not having to read as much from the disk. This was true for hard disks, but particularly true for floppies. I only stopped using the floppy "stacker anywhere" compression when I switched to Linux.
BTW I have known of memory compression being used to get round physical limits. E.g. ymight want to keep more than 2G of data in memory w/o swapping, on a system that supports only 2G physical memory.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Later, that same afternoon, while cruising in his AMC pacer with Britney pounding through the sub woofers, our beloved Emmett rolled through the drive through for a super size number 6 with an extra order of fries and noticed that the price had gone up from 6 to 6.10, Emmett was heard to say, "These prices are Skyrocketing!"
___
What is the most likely Slashdot article to appear next?
Poll Mastah
C'mon
They've also got lots of chips in inventories to meet sales. A plant fire when demand is tight is one thing, but a planned shutdown when demand is slack is quite another.
But starting a buying panic is very much in their interest. CNet bought the story, hook-line&sinker. Now you. Fortunately, the hobbyist market is fairly small, and I doubt can move prices. The big OEMs (Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM) are smarter than to fall for this.
It's fairly obvious that prices are not 'skyrocketing'. But if they did, as happened last year, and stayed high, what would happen?
When software was just beginning to get bloated (I remember being shocked that CorelDraw required a massive 20Mbyte), it became expensive to get a large enough hard disk (80Mbyte or so). Disk prices, at least at first, didn't drop enough for consumers to keep up with the increased demand for disk space. This led to a brief period of disk compression programs such as Stacker, which slowed down your machine a little but let you fit about 60% more stuff on your disk (typically). Eventually {Double,Drive}Space was included as a standard feature of MS-DOS (and then Win95). But now that disks are so cheap, I doubt if anyone bothers with it on a new system.
Similarly, a couple of years later, starting just before the launch of Win95, it started getting expensive to fit a system with the amount of RAM needed to run modern bloated applications. Products such as RAM Doubler appeared for the PC and Mac. (The PC version of one such program turned out to be a total fraud - it didn't compress things at all - but the others did actually do something.) In common with the disk compressors, the 'Double' in the name is misleading; you don't get anywhere near the same performance as a system with twice the RAM.
The way these RAM compressors (or at least Quarterdeck's offering) work is to set aside an area of memory, say 25% of physical RAM, for compressed pages. When the remaining memory gets full, pages are compressed and stored in the buffer instead of being paged to disk. When the buffer gets full you do have to go to disk, but you can write compressed pages and several of them at once, so disk activity is less. Compressing the pages takes CPU time, but most PCs have fast CPU relative to disk speed so the speed burden isn't too great.
Having said that, I didn't notice any wonderful speedup from Quarterdeck's RAM booster (can't remember the name) on a 16Mbyte machine, and it made Windows less stable. But done right, it might work.
Could you do something similar for Linux? One tactic might be to create a RAM disk with some of your memory, and use something like the crusty old DoUbLe (or however it's spelt) code to make it a 'compressed partition'. Then get Linux to swap to that before going to disk.
However you wouldn't get the benefit of pages being compressed when they go to disk, nor of compressed pages being simply moved from the RAM-swap to the swap partition. AFAIK you can tell Linux to use one swap device in preference to another, but you can't ask for a tiered swap scheme where pages from one device spill onto the next. (Please correct me if I am wrong.)
Another problem is that with DoUbLe, the size of the device varies according to how well things have compressed so far, and swapping requires a fixed-size device. So none of this would probably work at all.
But there are plenty of ultra-fast compression algorithms out there (LZO is fast and GPLed) which you might stick in the kernel. Then get the kernel to compress pages and dump them in a big pile somewhere, and to swap them out only when there is no alternative (or when the system is idle).
I have no idea whether such a scheme would make a significant difference; I'd guess that many of the most bloated programs do have highly compressible data areas though. If it did work, then Linux would be able to survive a memory shortage better than other OSes. It might also help ultra-cheapskate manufacturers making thin clients or mobile devices.
Does any of that make sense?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Everytime people at work want faster machines, they ask "can't we just put more ram in it?".. I have to explain that doubling the ram in that p100 running win95 is just not going to double their performance..
That said, I have one reason to use over 128 megs of ram -AfterEffects. I use AfterEffects daily, and it uses a 'ram preview' function that stores as much of your video comp in a ram buffer as possible, then lets you view it playing back smoothly with sound - This is such an important tool to me at work, my G3 there has 768 megs. (this also lets me be lazy about running multiple apps at the same time).
-
air and light and time and space
Is the $6.00 component a 64Mbit device or a 64Mbyte device?
I think it's the former, but I'm not sure.
--
Peter
Raytracing isn't the big RAM eater - the modelling is. I have 320MB in my P2 (and 512 in my Alpha, but that's purely "because I can", I never use anywhere near all of it :-) Anyway, the 320MB in my P2 gets used up routinely when I'm doing 3D work (take a look at this picture for an example of one that used the full 320 and then some virtual memory as well.) This is using 3D Studio and Bryce 4, not Povray, which needs far less RAM.
On a related note, whose fucking bright idea was it to put only 3 RAM slots in my damn motherboard instead of 4 like it should? I would *love* to put some of the RAM from my ALpha into my P2 and actually put it to use.
--