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DRAM Makers Suffer Due to Lackluster Vista Adoption
quixote9 writes "We've heard conflicting estimates of how widely adopted Vista has been. Now comes some hard data. DRAM makers ramped up to meet the huge expected demand for more memory needed by Vista. Except the demand hasn't materialized. Now they're suffering. Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs."
people are using Vista without Aero Glass?
/is/ possible my friends.
It
I think the OP meant DRM makers and not DRAM makers :)
It's been well acknowledged here that Vista sales are roughly only equal to XP over the same time measured. OEMs were already standardized on 1GB (not low end of the market) of ram prior to Vista and Vista does run adequately on a GB of ram. What did they think would happen? Most of the PC market has been riding the MS/PC roller coaster long enough to have a feel for the time to buy and will likely hold on to XP until mainstream support has ended.
load "$",8,1
If the RAM manufacturers are building up stocks of RAM that nobody is buying then maybe they'll start pushing the prices down further to make it more attractive. Then those of us who are using Linux benefit again from Vista's lack of adoption. :)
Maybe the people care more about doing work than how they look doing it? Eye candy is nice, but it's not necessary. It's not going to make or break a purchase in the way that productivity enhancements would, and even then, people make do with what they have. The more versions that get released of whatever software, the less incentive to upgrade as it gets closer to "it works", and less people will care about improving the software the further along it gets. Throw money in and then people have even more reservations!
Twinstiq, game news
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but DRAM sales may lag now, but eventually people will be moving to Vista when it becomes the sole option on new machines.
RAM getting cheaper is always a good thing, mainly because on 95% of most people's machines, the biggest performance bottleneck is RAM (or lack of) forcing apps to swap.
"You must be new here" "In Soviet Russia, Vista trolls YOU!" "Vista? Imagine a Beowulf of those!" "Netcraft reports Microsoft Vista DIEING!" I'll take the Cowboy Neal Option...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I paid $399 for Vista Ultimate. I thought it would net me beau coup geek cred. Now everyone's laughing at me!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Nobody likes elitism....
f u nub
And almost every new computer comes with Vista. I bought a new laptop and it came with Vista and only 512Mb of RAM. Man was it slow. I suppose I could have gone out and put a couple of Gig into it but I just wiped it and install Ubuntu. It's real peppy now!
Of course this was to happen! Microsoft showed its investors and key manufacturers that the OS release will be on par to its Windows 95 explosion, which everyone knew was not going to be the case. Times Square ads, articles, and lots of other forms of attention only brought a weak demand in the market. Windows XP was good enough, and consequential events like these show that.
However, I'm pretty sure that, as the article points out, this falling trend will reverse itself when back-to-school season starts and people need to upgrade their old machines to keep them running or up-to-date.
Haven't memory prices dropped every day since it were introduced?
I used to pay X amount for 256KB memory upgrades, the other day I paid similar for 1GB.
Maybe this is more to do with lifespan of memory than anything, changing design and automatically expiring themselves from the market.
I have just had to throw away a whoel gig of memory because I got a new motherboard, there was no chance I could have purchased another gig of the same and just expanded on what I had.
The newer fabs (from other companies) got my money instead of the established companies with older fabs.
liqbase
Since DRAM makers only "feel" the adoption obliquely (ostensibly through the PC maker demand for more RAM on newly sold boxes) this could be taken two ways:
1) Vista isn't being as widely adopted as has been declared.
2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par).
It may even be some combination of the two. Now, I didn't go into any great amount of research as to the offerings of OOB PC manufacturers, however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). From this, I make the careful and qualified surmise that new Windows-preloaded PCs are getting Vista. Knowing the user base, it is unlikely that they are replacing the OS themselves.
As far as I know, most people's personal budgets are still a little tight, so it is likely that people likely to buy PCs from Dell (casual users for the most part) are going to opt for the cheaper models, which, upon a little further inspection, don't have the horsepower or the RAM to run full Vista rendering.
These really aren't "hard numbers". It is difficult to determine anything concrete with this indirect indicator.
Boy, would I be class pissed action if lawsuit I was an investor! Yes, it is quite troubling when I purchase stock for $22.07 and sell it for $31.02 a few months later. Please notify me if you get a response on your SEC filing and I'll join in!
Not only is firefox a hog (as mentioned above), but caching will cause higher reported ram usage than is actually required/used.
So does that mean prices will drop soon to compensate for an oversupply? I don't think anyone would complain...
Insert Sig Here
Man, I'm pissed. I had this brilliantly snarky reply all typed up and then realized the article is about DRAM, not DRM. Damn you, demons of proper context!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Since Vista came out, there seems to be lots of different reports coming out with its adoption, with Microsoft saying that everyone loves Vista, and it is selling at record rates; and lots of incidental evidence (some companies still offering XP as an option on new computers, only 300 legitimate copies having been sold in China, this DRAM news) suggesting that it is not doing very well. But of course, none of this is complete or non-biased.
So, can we really say how Vista is faring in the marketplace?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
And it just keeps getting cheaper. Pretty soon, I expect Kellogg's to start stuffing a couple of gigs into boxes of Froot Loops.
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The licenses sold, claimed by MS, can be fairly accurate. After all, a sale by MS can still sit on the shelf of some retailer, or been force-fed to people buying new hardware. When it comes to licenses used, I'd rather take other factors into account. One would be hardware sales, but after all it's possible to turn off all those goodies, so I wouldn't call it the best possible indicator.
Personally, what I'd deem a very good indicator would be the sales numbers of the different licenses. I.e. how many of the "minimum" Vista licenses have been sold vs. some of the "useful" ones. We all remember WinXP Home and Pro, and how "useable" Home was. Generally, whoever got the "Home" edition of XP got it 'cause he couldn't get his PC without any license and tossing Home was cheaper than tossing Pro.
So it would be fairly safe to assume that a considerable fraction of those "force-fed" minimum licenses have been bought because there's no way to get the computer without any OS and the first command issued on the new crate was fdisk. So, pants down, how mand licenses of what level have been sold?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Vista is not selling.
It's selling 95% as fast as new PC's are. In the PC world, people tend to just use the OS until it's time to scrap the machine. Apple people upgrade OS's every year or so because they have money to burn and Linux people upgrade seeming daily... actually, I don't know why. Vista is being sold on 95% of all new PC's like always. Vista will be just as successful as Windows XP has been.
But are people running out to buy the new OS for no particular reason? No. Why would they?
I don't respond to AC's.
Or, maybe all those fuckwads who were screaming about "Vista requires 4GB of RAM to even run Solitare!!1!" were actually full of shit, and people didn't have to run out and load up?
Nah, that'd be pro-M$ bullshit. I must be a plant, paid by Bill himself to spread these lies!
The obvious reason for lackluster profits must have nothing to do with the market, overproduction, resources, or anything else. It's all Vistas fault.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Linux is easy to set up. I pop in the Ubuntu CD, it boots, I double-click on the setup button, and if I accept the defaults it goes on to install everything. Hell, with the vast majority of systems all your hardware works out of the box which is more than I can say about Windows.
Thank you for your lack of insight into our tribe. Otherwise, you're pretty right about Windows.
SRSLY.
Haven't memory prices dropped every day since it were introduced?
In fact they have NOT. Memory is, more than any other component in your PC, a true commodity, and it can be a volatile one at that. Like the market for gasoline it can sometimes be open to manipulation in the same way, though the major players are less apt to participate in collusion as petroleum refiners are notorious for doing.
I distinctly remember an incident involving a fire at a major DRAM manufacturing facility which produced a step change downward in global production capacity--this at a time when demand continued to grow at a healthy clip. Prices spiked even faster, and with a greater magnitude by far, than fuel prices did when hurricane Katrina took out all that refining capacity (we are talking doubling and tripling of prices here). In another incident it wasn't a drop in supply but a surge in demand sparked by the first Christmas season with Windows XP-equipped PCs for sale--inventory dried up and DRAM prices doubled.
aybe this is more to do with lifespan of memory than anything, changing design and automatically expiring themselves from the market.
That can have an effect on DRAM prices actually, except that the effect is opposite to what is happening today: when new memory formats come out it usually fuels demand and raises prices. Demand instead has been flat and prices have dropped. The problem is overcompensation to deal with the release of Vista (they were trying to avoid what happened when XP came out). Memory makers are lousy commodity managers in comparison to how those who produce gasoline, grain, metals, etc and really botched up--but MS also botched up and made the problem worse:
* Vista missed Christmas--it was in limited, corporate-and-developer-only release until January. Not only did this mean the vista launch couldn't take advantage of the shopping season, it also meant that the shopping season for computers itself was blunted as shoppers turned elsewhere for gift ideas (why buy a PC with crufty old XP when spiffy new Vista will be out and pre-installed on machines within weeks?). No demand there
* Though XP needs a relatively modest increase in resource requirements compared to its direct ancestor Windows 2000, the vast majority of the first XP adopters were moving from the DOS-based line of Windows (95/98/Me) and of all things what XP wanted the most over DOS-based Windows was RAM. DOS-based windows couldn't even properly use RAM over a certain level and most machines got to a certain level and stayed there because performance was maxed out. With XP, an old Win98 box could be make quite usable for a cheap price by simply plugging in more RAM. This fueled demand, which raised RAM prices.
* XP has been out for a VERY long time, and between all the service packs, updates and the demanding games and applications released in the past 5 years the demand for RAM has increased gradually even as the base OS is little unchanged. As Vista was released the minimum requirements were already met by most PCs up to a year old. This wasn't the case with XP, where so many crufty old PCs running Win98 were not up to the task of running XP.
* Vista is not different enough from XP to matter - turn off aero glass and to the casual user you have XP with a new UI theme--not much immediately useful comes right to mind. When XP came out it was targeted at legions of 98 and Me users, and 98 and Me were great stinking piles of crap compared to XP. Vista IS meaningfully better architecturally speaking but these advantages are only understood by computer scientists and software engineers. Furthermore, in the cutthroat market of PCs most new PCs are equipped with the featureless "home basic" edition, and that is what most users see, and that edition is well served by existing memory configs.
DRAM prices are like rollercoasters--they might have started at the top and will end up at the bottom, but all these external forces introduce "waves" that go up as well as d
This is revisionist history. People did run out and buy windows 95. In fact, they stood in line overnight to get it. Let's face it; the bloom is off the rose. Things have changed considerably and no matter how you spin it, vista has been met with a lackluster reception. It's not that vista is so bad(it is but so was win95), it's that people don't care one way or another, i.e. windows is no longer cool. WinPCs are even parodied in the Mac adds as the dorky guy and everybody laughs. Believe it or not, there was a time when windows was the cool thing, at least in some circles.
"Casual Windows users will use any operating system that is loaded on their machine."
And if they upgrade, will try to scrimp by on the existing amount of memory. Most people don't know that they'd probably get a dramtic performance increase for the price of a single stick of RAM.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I wouldn't have expected to see a lot of interest in warmed-over XP systems. If you want the tech in Vista you probably also want the hybrid hard drive, DX10 video, integrated ReadyBoost flash, etc., that is still high-end.
Rising up the bar aren't we first it was the text installer, the text boot or the "multitude" of package managers in linux world. Now it's clicking on an fat install icon all that makes the difference? Man, we aren't running out of arguments aren't we?
Listen... I've got a couple DBAs, people that struggle daily with Oracle RAC HP-UX, DB2 and MSSQL wastin' 2 business days hunting down drivers for an HP "Vista Ready" business (read, humdrum) laptop... and they're still dissatisfied... and these machines would run flawless on a good ubuntu, centos.
I've stopped caring, Linux isn't a donkey and your arguments aren't a good enough carrot.
All I know and see is that GNOME is becoming the poor man's OS X.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
1 gig of RAM is similar under Vista to what 512 megs did under XP. As a result, since most new computers had been getting 1 gig of RAM prior to Vista's release, Vista itself would not be a reason to boost the amount of system memory in new computers.
So, since most people were already at 1 gig on reasonably modern machines, and older machines just didn't have the CPU and GPU power to run Vista well, there hasn't been a real NEED to upgrade. Many of us moved to 2 gigs of memory over a year ago, not for Vista, but for games and other applications.
(Though that is not strictly true. You can divide these up into independent components that could run in parallel on today's processors. On a cluster, you could also drop components that aren't needed on a specific node.)
On a normal system, I see no reason why the OS kernel should take more than a megabyte or two. In a distributed system, you might be able to get away with half that on a minimal node, although the average would probably be in the 1-2 megs region. Anything beyond that would probably function at least as well in userspace.
With the increasing popularity of kernel bypass mechanisms for everything from graphics to networking to disk access, the number of kernel-based drivers needed on a high-performance system is probably much lower than for a cheap, low-end machine. Thus, the kernel size would be reduced accordingly. I'd say you'd be able to cut a quarter of the kernel (code and data) out with sufficient kernel bypassing. On a normal system, then, you'd be looking at 0.75 - 1.5 megs for the kernel. Of course, by doing kernel bypassing, you're implicitly doing some level of offloading, which trims the values down even further.
The next major eaters-of-RAM would be the system libraries (eg: glibc), standard environments (eg: X11) and standard toolkits (eg: OpenGL). Hardware implementations of OpenGL are almost standard, and physical X11 terminals provided hardware implementations of the X11 client-side, which means that most of that is (or could be) built onto the graphics card. Not sure what you could do about glibc, but I'd have thought there'd be a way of putting some of the core, essentially static, code into hardware.
Linux with X will run on 5 megabytes of RAM. Subtract 1 megabyte for the kernel and 1 for user applications, you get 3 for what absolutely has to be in RAM for the software to work. If you can shove a megabyte of this into hardware, this pulls your requirements down to 2 for the system. In practice, almost nothing can actually run at any decent speed on such a system, but we're figuring out what the underlying requirements are, not what the running requirements are.
The system requirements would seem to be 3 megabytes for a running minimal kernel, system libraries and basic GUI. This is your OS, in the modern sense, capable of running anything Linux can run. It's the minimal, fully functional system. Your applications will obviously take vastly more than that, but they can use anything above the basic minimum. Additional libraries, facilities, etc, will also take more memory, but if they're all in userspace and do kernel bypass, they're part of the applications and not part of the OS. They're also going to be faster.
Linux might easily start with 64 processes. Most won't be running at any given time, so you don't need more than a few critical data tables in RAM to be able to swap the process. The typical user is unlikely to be running more than four heavy applications at the same time, and of those, you're very unlikely to have more than two actually alive at a given time. If an active process is given 64 megs to play with, you need 128 megs for active stuff.
All in all, any complete distro (ie: distro software + hardware used) that needs more than 256 megs of RAM for a desktop must be doing something horribly wrong. It is simply not reasonable to use any more than that. Of course, most distros DO need more than that in practice, because machines are not designed to offload or perform kernel bypassing. The CPU does all the heavy lifting, and that's expensive on resources. It's not technically the fault of the software, it's the hardware that is at fault, but really even if the hardware was present, not many software distros can - as yet - take enough advantage of the capabilities to run on a minimal box.
(A lot of the software exists for Linux, it just isn't supplied by anyone or utilized by anything.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I built together a new computer 3 months ago, with vista in mind (i.e. all hardware selected so it is supported well), and bought a vista ultimate OEM to it. I have been using it for 3 months: there were no problems with the hardware, but still I could not get used to it: it is slow and really clumsy, after a while I disabled aero but still things where slow and annoying. Disabled UAC, got some hotfix to fix slow file copying/moving/deleting, but it didn't help.
Last week I bought an xppro OEM and reinstalled it on the machine. What a relief. It is just incomprehensible that this crap vista is being forced down everyones throat (most people that buy a new PC now). The arrogance of MSFT has reached new limits if they think they can get away with it.
If I were a dumb user and not able to reinstall xp myself, I would revert from windows alltogether in disgust and probably buy a mac now. Really, people keep telling that everyone will get used to it and will be using vista sooner or later since there won't be an alternative. I doubt it, I think this time they have gone too far and have overestimated there market power. This may well be the beginning of the end and cause further and larger scale defections towards Mac OSX and maybe also linux for some more advanced users. I cannot imagine that vista will really replace all other windows version, even with MSFT's power, this product is just too crappy even for them.
Most companies will wait till 2010 when the last commercial support for XP expires, and then who knows what is available in the market. I think there may be enough alternatives by then to being forced to 'upgrade' to vista in 2010.
I have a hard time selling computers with Vista loaded. Most customers react the same way when playing with Vista; eye rolls, sighs and shoulder shrugs.
Consumers spurned DivX, why shouldn't they spurn Vista?
Maybe end users aren't that dumb. Maybe they recognize the value of DRM and WGA? Of course Microsoft will view this as a PR problem and throw a billion dollars at a Vista advertising campaign. Microsoft won't recognize the fact that legitimate users don't want to be treated like criminals.
All Windows users I know dislike WGA. Who wants to called a thief after purchasing a computer? Are there any slashdot Windows users that actually like the fact that WGA is running?
As evidence that absolutely means nothing, this year I've upgraded two desktops and a laptop to XP from Vista (speed issues). I upgraded four different XP desktops and a Vista laptop to Kubuntu (laptop owned by me). So far, no requests to go back to Windows. I wasted four hours of my life fixing the printer problems caused by a Microsoft/HP automated update to a XP Media Center Edition computer (Both companies blamed the other). If Ubuntu had better HP All-In-One support I probably could have upgraded that family as well.
Food for thought,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.