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A DIMM Future for RAM Bundles
VeggiePossum23 writes "PC WORLD has an article about rising concerns that computer manufacturers will be cutting the amount of bundled RAM they sell with their PCs owing to rising prices of dynamic memory. The article claims that spot pricing shows a rise of almost $15.00 for 256MB modules of DDR DRAM in some markets. According to a Reuters article on ZDNet, the price rises are caused by shortage of memory chips, and this is causing the prices of memory to raise at the fastest rate in four years. Even Intel is said to be worried at the overall trend of price hikes for all types of memory. The Inquirer has a similiar article from a couple of weeks ago which includes a chart showing how the third-party memory manufacturers are doing. Kingston tops the chart for revenue."
Yeah, I remember waiting for prices to drop to $100 / 1 MB SIMMs before upgrading.
It wasn't all that long ago it would cost several times more to max our your RAM than it did to purchase the computer. Buy a $3k computer, put in $5-10k RAM (and drop another couple grand on a 20 MB hard drive).
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Seriously though, it's been nice for the flash market, which is where the manufacturers are shifting capacity. Prices there have dropped nicely. If both markets continue to do well, more capacity will come online, and prices will drop again across the board until manufacturers start ramping up DDR2 capacity at the expense of DDR1 (as has happened to PC133).
Normal fluctuations in the RAM market - nothing to see here.
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IIRC, there's since been a price-fixing lawsuit. I think it was even on Slashdot.
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So, who would that be? China and . . . China?
Depends how you count China & Taiwan. Most countries pretend that Taiwain isn't de facto a separate country.
just a note: i dont think the default dell-ers have any idea that their ram is low. they just know that the machine may run slowly. they usually dont have any idea why. if you figure a 128MB machine with even just 32MB of shared video, thats only 96MB left for XP. not a good idea.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
If there is a toaster shortage, you can build a new factory pretty rapidly. Not so with chips. With cars, demand is pretty steady and factories are rarely used to capacity. If you have a chip factory which is not used to capacity, producing an extra chip is very cheap, so it is a waste to not produce as many as you can. On the other hand, producing an extra car is rather expensive even when the factory is otherwise idle -- so idle capacity doesn't push car prices down to unsustainable levels.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Eight months ago I built a computer with two Kingston 512 MB PC2700 memory modules at a cost of $75 each. Today the exact same memory costs $115 each on newegg.
Too bad he never really did say that
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
It's getting harder and harder to do that these days with the variety in DIMMs on the market and the compatibility problems between different manufacturers. Manufacturers are even having problems staying compatible with themselves at high speeds/low CAS values (eg the modules you can buy in pairs that are specially tested with each other).
I have had a hell of a time with memory on a dual Xeon server I built recently; I know I wouldn't want to be mixing modules from different manufacturers on it!
If it's getting more expensive, that means that memory purchased today will be worth more to buyers tomorrow and worth the same to you (plus warehousing of course). You can charge tomorrow's prices for the ram and make a profit. If the price is rising faster than the cost to store it, then you are making money. So, your reason for not stocking it shouldn't be the rising price but rather the decreased demand for the product that makes it not cost effective to stock.
In my experiences, you do need that much RAM to run Word and IE on top of XP comfortably.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
That wasn't a "language card", although it was installed in the "language card" slot. The Apple Language Card had a ROM chip on it that contained the version of BASIC that wasn't installed in your machine by default. This was so that you could run Applesoft BASIC programs on an Apple II or Integer BASIC programs on an Apple II+ at the flip of a switch. What you got was a RAM expansion card.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
This is OT, and I know it, but information never hurt anyone, even if it's a bit out of place.
When top shows Gaim et al using 40+ meg of RAM, it's including shared libraries with it, too. You're also kind of overblowing your numbers: top is telling me that GAIM is only using 4mb of non-shared RAM (14mb including shared), which I don't think is exorbitant. Mozilla on the front page of CNN.com uses 32-19=13 meg of RAM. Tweak your caching if you find that it's using > 50mb, I suppose.
In short, top is slightly misleading.
However, it's generally acknowledged that gcc creates slightly more bloated executables than Visual C++ does, if that's what you were getting at.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
You are leaving out opportunity cost. He could be doing something else with that money instead of stocking SDRAM.
:)
Also, the demand for SDRAM, an almost obselete component, will likely fall, which very much increses the risk that SDRAM prices will fall, and fall much further than they would have otherwise because of this pricing bubble that they are involved in now.
The interesting thing about computer components is the general pricing curve when you look at it over a very long term, like 10 years. Initially it starts out very expensive, falls to a minimum when it's about 2 generations behind current, then rises again as production is ceased, and only continues to rise as less and less suppliers feed the tiny residual demand for people who can't or won't upgrade for whatever reason.
An example, try pricing a full length monochrome 8 bit ISA video card... it's more expensive than you might think.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Computers are cheap. RAM is cheap. Developer time to optimize/tweak/etc is expensive and frequently non-productive, especially if you have a cross-platform product. Granted, with all the outsourcing going on...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
You mean like that ratio of 1 person out 100 people is 1%?
Considering dollars are what they are using to establish market share, it makes absolute sense. :)
So, who would that be? China and . . . China?
Well... there's the "People's Republic of China", and the "Republic of China", two completely different countries (well, in the eyes of the PROC, the ROC is a breakaway republic, sort of like how Saddam viewed Kuwait). So, "Chinese countries" would be technically correct--and that's the best kind of correct!
Also, the ROC (aka Taiwan) is the source of much of the world's RAM, so the original poster's comment has some validity.
M-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Yes. Since there is more than twice as much available area on a 300mm wafer as a 200mm one, you come out ahead if the 300mm wafer is = 2x the price of the 200mm one. That wafer price crossover is near, or has already happened, depending on what sort of deal you get from your wafer suppliers.
The chips made on the wafer don't get bigger--they're the same size or smaller. The advantage is that you get more than twice as many chips on a wafer. Time spent on each machine in the fab is money--if you can pattern more chips at once at photo, etch more chips at once in dry etch, and test more chips at once in probe, you can make chips more quickly and more cheaply than your competitors.
The big downside of 300mm (and the reason most companies put it off so long) is that it requires either extensive refittings of existing equipment or (more commonly) a completely new fab. Since we're talking ~3B USD, very few companies could justify that.
As you might imagine in such an industry, once your competitors begin doing something like that, you better have an answer for it. Infineon's move to build 300mm (first DRAM maker to do it AFAIK) looked like a bad move at the time, as it was an enormous cash sink, but now they've come out of it much more competitive for it.
Now a quad Opteron box....
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