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Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices To One-Year Low
alphadogg writes "DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said.
Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of $0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys."
Would that Scotch,
Were so cheap by the DRAM,
A shave, a shot, a gig;
Still change for the tram.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
DRAM began losing value most recently in December as the Western holiday shopping season wound down, Lin said. But major manufacturers such as Elpida Memory, Powerchip Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics kept pumping out chips to stay competitive, he said.
Really? They actually employed that strategy? "The market is saturated so we need to make more DRAM to raise profits." I don't understand, were they uninformed about demand being satisfied?
... unless of course you're subsidized but that's a whole other rant.
I mean, are they incapable of curbing production for a quarter? I understand these are huge plants that can't be turned on and off with the flip of a switch but if they're not careful they can hurt themselves indefinitely. I'm glad to be getting dirt cheap DDR3 sticks of memory but I don't want to see those companies compete each other into the red over it. I hope they're right when they say it's seasonal because it sounds like they're in for some tough times all the way through March. Farmers will tell you that flooding the market is a surefire way to destroy your competition as well as yourself
My work here is dung.
"I got an action figure!" "I got some DRAM chips!" "I got a rock."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
historic highs around $2.80
You want historic highs? I remember a DRAM crunch in the 1980s when prices spiked at about $1000 per megabyte. (That's about 150,000 times more costly per bit than current prices.)
Now, get off my lawn.
Fortunately (?) a lot of DDR2-era motherboards were affected by that huge batch of bad capacitors, so it might not be a bad idea to replace your mainboard before one of them fail.
Of course, I'd still feel compelled to pull together enough spare parts to build a machine around the old mainboard anyway... 'sigh' the many trappings of spending money on things computer-related :-/
Can the average PC user (not necessarily the more technically inclined users here on Slashdot) be trusted not to screw anything up inside a desktop or laptop PC when installing RAM sticks?
I’m inclined to say yeah, most of them could. And the very few who couldn’t probably know it and wouldn’t touch the inside of their computer if their life depended on it, which is okay because they are probably related to half a dozen people who could.
Yeah, you’re going to have a few truly incompetent and stupid people who take a screwdriver to their PC’s innards and screw things up something serious, but at some point we have to allow natural selection to do its job...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
That's probably for the chip, before it's soldered onto a DIMM, before it's even left the factory.
You'd be amazed how much money needs to be spent to turn it into something you can actually plug into your PC.
Can the average PC user....be trusted not to screw anything up inside a desktop or laptop PC when installing RAM sticks?
From personal experience, yes. Show them a picture of where the ram slot is, how to insert it, and "make sure the notch lines up", and generally they either figure it out (80%), or call for help (20%).
Non-techies arent morons, you know, and installing ram is intentionally very hard to screw up.
Its also per gigaBIT, not gigabyte. Multiply by 8 and you have $22.40 sticks dropping to $6.40. I do remember it being around $20 a gig a while ago, and if you check current prices RAM is about $8 a gig now.
Yes, that's right. DDR2 is 'over the precipice' - it's old technology at this point.
We're kind of at a point similar to where we were in the mid-90s, where the "last generation" (high end 486) systems were just as fast/comparably fast to "this generation" (early Pentium) processors, but RAM support (and availability, utility, etc.) was more significant.
Right now, any system 3-5 years old is likely to be 'good enough' for most peoples' tasks - all except the most demanding users. The bottleneck will be RAM. On the older systems with only 1-4GB of DDR2 support (or present), this is going to start being a problem.
We ran into the same thing a couple years ago with DDR, and a couple years before that with PC133: smart and/or financially capable people bought as much of the stuff as they conceived they'd need to keep those systems supplied long enough to replace them outright. (In many cases, I know that DDR RAM held those systems out until quite recently.)
In most cases, systems with DDR2 are nearing their EOL anyway. They're a bit aged, and very few have been produced OEM in the last year or so. DDR is "gone", so to speak; DDR2 will be there in a year or so, at this rate.
DDR3 is technically superior to DDR2 in almost every way: it's lower power, runs cooler, and is markedly faster. The chipsets which interface with it are better. Forget DDR2 and move on; it's old tech. Use the systems for what they can do and don't fret it - just replace them if you need to.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Aren't you contradicting yourself a bit? Those 3-5 year old computer have 1GB or 2GB RAM already and they are being sufficient. I have a laptop, bought in January 2007, so it's 4 years old. I came with 1GB RAM, it now has 2GB RAM because it was a cheap upgrade. It was a laptop on sale because it couldn't reach Vistas requirements, so back then 1GB wasn't all that hot either. So, unless you meant those "demanding users", for a normal user 1GB is enough, 2GB better.. Beyond that not so much.
I do advocate to take the most RAM you can afford for any machine you have and I have done this since at least 2005. My wifes new iMac has 16GB RAM. Does she need it? No... But the day she thinks it's too slow, I can just say... "Sorry, it's already maxed out, I can't do anything". It gives a bit more headroom, but I've never seen it use more than 4GB (which is what it came with). I'd call it "anti-bitching-insurance". ;-)
Same thing with my brothers new computer: got 16GB for it. It was two 8GB kits at 75€ or so... Not exactly expensive.
Will they use it? My wife definitely not. My brother may or may not benefit from it given he plays a lot of games.
For me? I live on what comes out of the dumpsters and buy left and right stuff to upgrade. Got a AMD Athlon 64 X2 socket 939 somewhere and 4 sticks of 1GB DDR RAM. Bought myself a motherboard that supported that, and whammo, for the price of a new motherboard I got myself a machine that's more than enough for anything I throw at it.
Yes, this is exactly the issue - 1Gbit ram chips make 1GB ram sticks, and most people are beyond the point of adding more 1GB sticks. The only use for these now is in the two or three 1GB sticks that manufacturers put in new low-end systems. The article is very deceptive since the prices of bigger ram chips/sticks have not fallen by anywhere near as much, though they have fallen.
I've been preaching the no ESD straps for a long time. I have never killed any electronics with ESD.
1 Gbit != 1 GB
8*1Gbit = 1 GB
last i checked normal form factor could fit 16 chips so 2GB stick... after that you have to go to higher density.
last i checked 2GB on a stick was still a decent amount.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
and that they now have to process a warranty return and lie about using a wrist strap.
In the last 5 years doing IT work, I have NEVER used a wrist strap. I have probably installed well over a terabyte of RAM, totalling well over 200 sticks, as well as building 30-40 computers, and NEVER had a component fried when I was done with it.
See, when you open the METAL CASE of a computer, youre touching METAL, and discharging most of the ESD you have built up, so having someone fry a stick of ram in that manner is really pretty rare, especially if you mentioned "hold it by the heat spreader, NOT the pins"-- as even if you do discharge on the heatspreader, I dont think it would do very much.
I've never used an ESD strap and have never killed any electronics with ESD. I've even zapped a motherboard while working on carpet (dumb) and it worked for years. I just make sure I touch the case first but i've installed RAM around a hundred times from 30-pin SIMMs on a 486 to triple channel DDR3 on an i7. I once had a 512MB ddr-2600 crucial DIMM cause BSODs and need to be RMAed after about 2 years of use, but i doubt that was ESD related.