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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."
Regular ol' SDRAM is getting pretty damn pricey too. We've had to stop stocking it. It's become a "special order", as it's too expensive to keep any amount of inventory for it for any length of time.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Tell me about it. I have a machine at home that has what was (at the time) a $700 16MB SIMM.
At the time I thought it was a good deal and it made X on my Linux box so much more useable.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We have enough people thinking that you need 512mb of RAM to run Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer.
If people think they actually need the 512mb rather than 256mb, then they'll pay the extra $40 or whatever for the ability to run their favorite games without closing some other programs.
Looking at the linked chart, it's interesting that the ratio of revenue to market share among all the categories listed is 86.7 +- 0.5 million dollars per percent market share.
That's a fairly high alignment of revenue among the companies.
Any economics people want to interpret that for me?
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
actually this is a serious problem. the programmers who develop games sometimes don't understand that gamers have limits and can't break their banks for the 69.99 game and 200 $ worh of ram every new release.
............. didn't think so.
if programming and programmers tried to make their code smaller, while avoiding pitfalls like 600MB installs (re q3,halflife etc.) wouldn't the games be more popular?
heck, even office 2003 full install is almost a gig. ONE FREAKING GIGABYTE!!!
Tell me why you need a 300 meg install for a word processor, spell-check feature and some rtf formatting? anyone?
There are plenty of printers and industrial applications that rely on old EDO or FPDRAM's. That old stuff is worth good bucks to the right guy at the right time. I made a couple hundred bucks unloading some 128 megs of EDOs at a swap meet to some guy who wanted to upgrade a bunch of printers at his shop.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Ever dealt with CAD? Rendering software? Financial analysis tools?
There are a ton of legitimate reasons to have a ton of RAM in a machine, and only about half can be written off as luxury items.
When the price of a workstation for my CAD users rises by 10% due to RAM jumps, it's a real concern and I can't tell them to play less games or ask for less RAM hungry apps. When you're configuring machines with 2GB of RAM in them. this sort of incremental price jump hurts.
China probably curbed the dumping of chips as a result of WTO pressure. The consumer price index has not yet detected much inflation in the US. However the recent unusual trend of deflation has stopped so that may seem like around 1-2% inflation over the last few months. this can't account for a $15 rise on a 256M chip.
China's influence in the market can. Recently there is a big internatonal trade row over their price gouging suppored by fiddling with tariffs, tax breaks and their dollar pledged currency values. WTO says it costs jobs... We see low cost chips... China is probably taking the middle ground and dumping a bit less than normal to appear better.
I'd bet low cost chips (and other things) make jobs here for us in the west for at least the guys that sell em. At the very least it make us able to afford more stuff. So where is this problem at that the WTO is all nasty over? Or are they just trying to be "important" and prove a need for themselves again.
Supply & Demand at work for you! Act now before the politicians mess it up!
[Really long blockquote deleted, just read the article, every line is a hoot]
[Ok, one blockquote]
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
There's actually something of a shortage of good "DDR1" chips at the moment. Apparently every major manufacturer is busy with DDR2/DDR3 chips (or "GDDR3"). Winbond for example has announced they soon discontinue their current CH-5 chips (0.13 micron, 200 MHz), and no announcement of follow-up. What is funny, their earlier (0.175 micron, 200 MHz) BH-5 chips perform much better -- you can't get CH-5 to reach the same ultra-tight latencies (2-2-2-5) at 200 MHz chip speed / 400 MHz memory bus speed. (This is why early Kingston PC3000 sticks are sweeter than most PC3200 or PC3500 sticks, especially Geil, but except Mushkin...) Bottom line, high-performance DDR chips are hard to find today, which is a probable reason for the NewEgg price rise.
However, very little thought has been given in this whole discussion to the fact that RAM has got faster all the time, and a wide selection of speed grades are offered today: from the 200 MHz (bus) PC1600 to the 466 MHz PC3700, maybe even 133 MHz PC133 somewhere. I'm surprised that the prices aren't wider apart than what they are! You are the only one I noticed who indicated what speed grade you are comparing to what (in your case, the same).
Be careful. Several times in the past publicity agents have placed stories like this in national magazines just before big price drops.
Everything in the magazines now is for sale. No magazine of which I am aware has any integrity.
Here's a quote from the Reuters article on ZDNet:
"We believe the tight supply situation will continue for the time being on delays by rivals in a move to shrink circuitry" to 110 nanometers, said a semiconductor trader at Samsung.
Notice the 100% conflict of interest.
After the Taiwan earthquake the rise in prices was very fleeting, due to the hype by publicity agents, and not any real lack of supply. The did the same scam concerning VCR heads, saying the lack of supply would make VCRs go up in price. Instead, the price dropped sharply.
This type of news (memory prices are rising) comes up periodically. Last time, I plotted the price of memory (from pricewatch for 512MB) for months before and after the peak. From that one anecdote, it seemed to me that the news media is manipulated to release such news (or they are complicit) by the memory sellers *AFTER the peak of the price rise has already passed* and when the prices are heading lower. In the conspiracy theory mode, I'd think this is manipulation to sell more at the higher price when prices are starting to go lower.
Make your own historical plot for the past several weeks (and future weeks) and see - since I only have one data point (well, set of points, but one "period").
Yeah, but he's not talking about their "value" RAM, he's talking about the higher performance HyperX stuff.
I bought some of that same RAM when it was $75, and to be fair, that was one of newegg's One Day Sale items. The regular price even at that time was closer to $90. Two weeks ago, it was $102.50. As of right now, it's $115.
This price increase isn't a steady 4-month rise. It's a 1-month spike. Here's to hoping it goes back down just as quickly.
Going though some old bills my dad showed me the one where he paid many hundreds of dollars to update his PDP-11 to 128K.
Actually it may have even been to 12K!
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
When I brought my Dell Desktop, I purposly "downgraded" it's spec as it was cheaper to get the "standard RAM" and larger hard drives from a third party retailer.
In other words, almost everyone buying computers.
Too bad i have no mod points today, that is insightful, sadly true, yet insightful.
Reminds me of when a recent employer asked why their computer was so slow. I took a look it. Pretty generic xp1400 running windows XP with 128MB ram. However the poor thing was diving into swap like an anorexic teen into a fruit smoothy. I added another 128mb and it ran great (well for a crummy computer running multiple insantces of bonzai buddy). For them though it was a night and day difference and they had no clue what the prolbem was.
Moral of the story: Anorexic teen girls love fruit smoothies. Especially "real" fruit smoothies.
(and xp eats ram?)
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
I bought a an old super 7 machine about 6 months ago for $70 Canadian and it included 320mb of ram, it was a K6-2 300 and i managed to oc it to 400MHz. I'm starting to look for more machines like this at $70 its cheaper than buying ram.
Yes, but if no other program you are running is using those same shared libraries, then your program is indeed using all that memory by itself.
GAIM depends on GTK2 now, which is pushing resource usage up and up.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Last time I looked Crucial was cheaper than Kingston, and is a MUCH better product! (Buy direct from their website via a link from the Gentoo website and they will make a donation to Gentoo Linux, or at least they were doing that last time I bought some dram from them).
Also you don't save much dropping in speed from PC2700 to PC2100, unless you are looking for the drams over 512mb.