Why Is RAM Suddenly So Cheap? It Might Be Windows

jfruh writes: The average price of a 4GB DDR3 memory DIMM at the moment $18.50 — a price that's far lower than at this time last year. Why is it so cheap? The memory business tends to go in boom and bust cycles, but the free availability of Windows 10 means that fewer people are upgrading their PCs, reducing RAM demand. Analyst Avril Wu said, "Notebook shipments in the third quarter fall short of what is expected for a traditional peak season mainly because Windows 10 with its free upgrade plan negatively impacted replaced sales of notebooks to some extent rather than driving the demand for these products." And prices might stay low for another two years.

Comments

Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I've already got 16GB in my home PC and I don't seem to use more than 3 or 4GB of it, but I guess I could squeeze in another 16GB...

Re:Cheap you say?

[jon3k]

This might not apply to you, but thought I'd share it, because it's a common misconception. So here's my computer right now. Notice the yellow arrow? Looks like I'm only using half of my 16GB of memory right? Now, notice the blue arrow? That's the total actually available memory. The rest is currently in use as cache. The reason windows shows it as free is because it could be freed if something actually needed to use it.

Worth mentioning, the only thing I have open in that screenshot is Chrome with ~20 tabs. Point being, a lot of people see memory usage below 100% and assume the memory isn't being used by the OS. The reality is, more memory might actually improve performance significantly even though you're not "using" 100% of your system's memory.

Re:Cheap you say?

[sectokia]

Yeah depends on what you are doing, if you are reading the same files over and over (or opening and closing the same apps over and over). However where do you draw the line? You could cache your whole hard drive in ram...

Re:Cheap you say?

[Xenx]

However where do you draw the line? You could cache your whole hard drive in ram...

Right there. That would be amazing.

Re:Cheap you say?

[queazocotal]

Weeel.
This whole argument became a hell of a lot less compelling now that even crappy SSDs will read random files at a couple of hundred meg a second.

The number of workloads where you actually need to reread files at over a couple of hundred meg as second, and have that working set be between 2 and 10 gigabytes or so, I suspect is going to equate to almost zero.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

With Vista Microsoft used to show the memory directly as in use, but the amount of ignorant people that complained about Vista using insane amounts of memory (even on this supposedly technical forum) was insane, so with win 7 they changed it to not directly report the cache as in use memory unless you know what you are looking for. I think those vocal idiots that complained did everyone a disservice as now people think anything above 4GB is simply unused.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Forgefather]

Had a friend that did this. Created a virtual hard disk in RAM and used it to play his games. The 64 gigs of ram where wholly unnecessary, but damn... those frame rates...

Re:Cheap you say?

[dbIII]

In my workplace there is a rather braindead application that sorts a lot of data on disk instead of in memory (closed source - otherwise would have been fixed ten years ago), even when the dataset is a lot smaller than memory. So we fed it a striped set of disks. Then we fed it an SSD. Then we fed it a couple of striped SSDs. Now it's using a RAM disk and it's an order of magnitude faster than even striped SSDs. Instead of going through a controller and other bottlenecks - bang - in and out almost as quick as sorting in memory. Several hours down to a few minutes.
The RAM disk is 200GB of 512GB of onboard memory though :)

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only chrome? 111 processes running? holy shit your machine is so bloated.

(looks at the 25 running. with firefox, breakout audio mixer, vlc, adb, classicshell and video file converter and feels smug.)
And yes thats total. from all users.

Re:Cheap you say?

[AK Marc]

Cached means used, not used as a disk cache. Notice your numbers don't add up. Cached = "in use" + modified. Available = standby + free. Use Resource Monitor (that little button at the bottom of task manager) to get a more detailed usage.

Where you'll see more performance without using the memory is when free is small. Standby is the OS's guesses as to what will end up in Cached. When it guesses right, you get better performance. This is closer to a "cache" in the way I think you are thinking of it. So as "free" shrinks, the OS shrinks standby to ensure you don't run out. This leads to fewer standby hits, making for a worse performance.

That's why in Windows (up to 7, have't tested with 8 and 10) Windows will if you have a page file page used memory, making the system slow as dirt. Leave your computer on overnight, and nearly everything will be paged, to maximize "Free" and "Standby", optimizing the system for new applications opened, and greatly punishing a user who locks his computer overnight with Chrome open with 20 tabs.

That's why someone with 16G should disable a paging file in Windows, for better performance.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Imrik]

cached = modified + standby, available = standby + free

Re: Cheap you say?

[loufoque]

I have 16GB and my computer frequently warns me about being out of memory. More than half of this RAM is consumed by Chrome, of course I have way more than 20 tabs open.
Different strokes fof different folks, but the point is that web browsers nowadays require an absurd amount of RAM.

Re:Cheap you say?

[UnknownSoldier]

I do this.

Have 32 GB RAM with 8 GB RAM DRIVE + 256 GB SSD

Having tons of RAM means you can spin up VM's and give each one 2 - 4 GB each.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even SSDs are still orders of magnitude slower than RAM. With RAM prices, barring the idiocy of Apple soldering RAM onto the motherboard, one should have any and all machines maxed out. I spent $50, and my low-end desktop machine has 32 gigs of RAM.

Re: Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that bad web design nowadays require an absurd amount of RAM (and CPU cycles).

It really is quite easy to hand write rich looking designs. But instead of doing this, most web developers tend to use a metric shit ton of linked script libraries, make stupid non-optimized calls from these non-optimized libraries and generally just make bad design decisions. I puke in my mouth a little every time I see a web design that has jQuery (or even multiple versions of it) and several third party libraries linked *just* to produce something equivalent to a newsletter subscription overlay popup. This means there will be a lot of unnecessary HTTP calls for something that could be done in a one single GET and a result that could be produced with maybe five lines of pure JavaScript.

My customers have been amazed at how fast I can make my sites run even though they look "complex" and more often than not have a lot of graphical elements embedded throughout the design. It's just a question of optimization and having a tiny clue about what you're doing.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't buy it. Since when is harddrive I/O the limiting factor when it comes to frame rates?

Re:Cheap you say?

[AK Marc]

Not according to Windows Resource Monitor.

Re:Cheap you say?

[rrohbeck]

At work I have a box with 64GB RAM. I configure VMs with 50GB filesystems so they usually fit completely in RAM. The performance is nice :(

Re:Cheap you say?

[MMC Monster]

My machine came with 16GB. A year ago one of the 4GB DIMMs died on me. I pulled it out and chucked it. I was planning on replacing it, but never got around to it.

I occasionally look at my memory usage. with 12GB ram and a 5GB swap, I almost never use more than 4GB of the ram and 3% of swap space.

tl;dr : Memory might be cheap, but we need less than we think we do.

Re:Cheap you say?

[nikkipolya]

An EDA app?

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought 32GB when I built this system in the middle of the DDR3 cycle. I don't plan on updating till the DDR4 cycle drops down to the same rate.

As for WHY. Nothing on my system ever actually uses 16GB let alone 32. But paired with a SSD, it's as fast as it can possibly get, even when it accesses the mechanical drives.

The problem (eg with Windows 10) is that the software running doesn't make great use of 4GB. Sure the OS might have it, but games are still being compiled as 32bit, and even when they aren't, they're not making use of 4GB of RAM, they're still using 2GB foot prints knowing full well they have no reason to waste the memory and 32GB of loading is still rediciously long period of time, even with a SSD. (A SSD on a SATA2 controller isn't going to do more than 200MB/sec, so to fully load a 32GB dataset you're looking at 3 minutes. On a mechanical drive it's closer to 50MB/sec so 12 minutes.) Sure you can get faster SSD's on PCie that do 1GB/sec... but nobody in their right mind uses those in a desktop when the GPU needs that bandwidth.

So a 2GB data set, maybe 10 seconds of acceptable loading time on a SSD, or 40 seconds on a mechanical drive, no better.

The other half of the argument is that INTEL isn't making more than 32GB available on their desktop CPU's. The Skylake processors are DDR4 and support 64GB ( i7-6700K Processor .) They know damn well that people aren't going to upgrade to the latest CPU if they uncap the memory limit.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use my leftover memory for a ram disk, on which resides /tmp, firefox cache and everything else I don't want cluttering my SSD.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably meant sustained high frame rates without stutter caused by loading from HDD.

Re:Cheap you say?

[beerbear]

Chrome starts a new process for each open tab. Doesn't have anything to do with his machine.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why draw the line there? What if you could cache your hard drive in RAM... twice?

Re:Cheap you say?

[Khyber]

"Since when is harddrive I/O the limiting factor when it comes to frame rates?"

Since the days of live-streaming the fucking world from the disk - e.g. GTA V

Re:Cheap you say?

[digitalchinky]

Although the impact is a little indirect, medical imaging systems are often rate limited by the hard drive. (When they aren't hamstrung by network speed that is) Frame rates are more a measure of how quickly you can scroll through the image stacks - the scanners themselves don't actually give you an 'image', they give you a bunch of instance objects that can potentially contain a few thousand parameters each - a subset of these within each object define how the pixel data will be interpreted to generate image data appropriate for the display depth.

You might have a 3000 image CT because the tech sent the raw acquisition rather than the more pertinent diagnostic sections, the radiologist expects to be able to scroll these very large stacks end to end ideally in one or two mouse movements - and they want to see every single image as that happens too. You don't always have enough RAM to store the entire data set so you have to load it from the hard drive as needed - then parse it out. Even when a study does fit in RAM the rad will usually have one or two series dragged over to the viewports a fraction of a second after the thumbnail has rendered - they are already flicking at the scroll wheel waiting for some business to happen, behind the scenes the image loader is still asking the PACS for a list of instance UID's and the path to the raw data because WADO is too slow :-)

No matter how fast the hardware is, there's always some inefficiency that people notice. Within an emergency room setting these delays can sometimes be costly.

Re: Cheap you say?

[O('_')O_Bush]

To be fair, Vista followed XP, and OS that could easily idle in under 150MB of memory, and while M$ thoughtfully forced you to push almost 1GB of memory into cache, they forgot to turn off warnings that you were running out of memory if you used up almost all your memory except the cache.

Effectively, for the end user, Vista does use up a GB or more of your RAM and complains loudly when it doesn't have it.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop has 24GB ram and no free slots.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

$ ps ax | wc -l
315

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

So? The more that's cached the better. Right now my computer intelligently caches all of the stuff I use most at the times I need them the most. If I could cache my hard drives (unlikely for a long time, as I have over 20 terabytes) that would be fantastic.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any game engine that isn't garbage isn't going to freeze the game while waiting for a texture to load. If anything, less textures should increase frame-rate.

In the case of GTA V, unloaded textures on geometry cause that geometry to be invisible.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, RAID 1 in RAM?

Re: Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

which is just one of the fucking reasons for NoScript in Deny All (Whitelist) Mode along with having a solid Hosts File to block connections to the most egregarious offenders. I don't waste CPU cycles or bandwidth on crap I don't give a damn about

Re:Cheap you say?

[Bing Tsher E]

Had a friend that did this. Created a virtual hard disk in RAM and used it to play his games. The 64 gigs of ram where wholly unnecessary, but damn... those frame rates...

I did this, and ran my entire BBS in a virtual hard drive. The machine in question had all 640K of RAM, but the BBS software (WWIV 3.21d) only needed about 192K to run. So I made a 320K ramdisk and put the data files there. It meant I didn't need a hard drive at all. I had to back the ramdisk up to a floppy once in awhile to protect against power failures.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Bing Tsher E]

Be careful there. You'll hurt the feelings of the people who think a big job is ripping and converting their blueray movie.

Re:Cheap you say?

[RogueyWon]

Yes, yes and a million times yes.

What we've seen over the last 18 months or so is a trend from storage drive speed being almost irrelevant in terms of game performance (aside from loading-times), towards it becoming one of the most critical factors. I'm guessing that, as you suggest, it is caused by a combination of the move towards more "open world" games, and an increase in the detail-level, and hence size, of game-assets.

The first game I'm aware of where it was a serious issue was Watch_Dogs. You'll recall that the PC version of that game took quite the hammering at launch. Not just because the game was rubbish (although it was), but because a lot of players were experiencing severe in-game stutter. In fact, I noticed it myself when I first installed the game. While it was ok on the indoor on-foot sequences, the moment I started moving around the open-world city, particularly in a car, it was stuttering constantly. Then I noticed that the timing of the stutter was perfectly in-sync with the activity of my disk-access light. So I reinstalled the game on my solid state drive and, surprise surprise, the stutter was completely eliminated.

There have been a large number of games since then which have been affected to varying degrees. Particular culprits include:

Dragon Age: Inquistion (infrequent but very severe periods of stutter when moving across invisible transition-points when running from a mechanical drive).

Far Cry 4 (at the lower end of severity, but stutter noticeable when opening doors or entering vehicles while running from a mechanical drive).

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (mild stutter and long texture-loading delays when running from a mechanical drive - for some reason much more noticeable than in Borderlands 2, which used the same engine).

The Witcher 3 (mild but noticeable stutter when moving at speed on horseback, particularly around towns/villages, when running from a mechanical drive).

Pillars of Eternity (yes, even in a top-down 2D RPG, there's stutter after issuing some commands, particularly for spells whose visual effects need to be loaded, when running from a mechanical drive).

Batman: Arkham Knight (the original unpatched release essentially unplayable due to severe stutter when running from a mechanical drive).

I suspect that poor optimisation is also a factor in some of these cases. After all, the console versions mostly avoid this stutter, despite the fact that they contain fairly slow and crusty mechanical drives. Irritatingly, some of the performance-comparison sites out there, particularly the (formerly excellent) Eurogamer Digital Foundry don't do drive speed comparisons and seem to use SSDs by default, so they don't pick up these issues.

There are still a few major releases that appear to run well from mechanical drives on PC; Shadows of Mordor and Metal Gear Solid 5, despite being open-world games, don't seem to have particular stuttering issues. But we're getting to the point now where if you want a decent experience in PC games, having a solid state drive (and preferably a large one) is as important as having a decent graphics card.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Luckyo]

Ramdisk reduces loading times, not framerates. If anything, it reduces framerates because there might be moments when that memory mapped to ramdisk could be used for caching.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Pope]

Hell, I used to do that with Infocom games back in the DOS days, because every command would hit the floppy to return the appropriate response.

Solution: RAM disk the same size as the floppy (320K), copy the whole disk to RAM to play, save games to the B: floppy. Game actions were stupidly fast for the most part.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

And besides maybe the 500 byte PE header, why does creating a stand alone process have much more overhead than an embedded child process like FF?

Chrome may need to do some work with mem management but the whole "it starts a whole proccess per tab!" is hyperbolic BS. ALL browsers do, the only thing chrome does differently is isolate them so when one tab crashes from malvertizements it doesn't take the entire parent process with it. How dare they make such a useful design choice!

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, I've got 32GB of RAM and spinning disks. I don't have any problems with game stutter.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you save posts or progress in door games? Where were the file uploads and downloads?

Sounds like a pretty lame BBS if it didn't even have the basic functions of a BBS.

Win 10

[rsilvergun]

is fine with 4. I put another 2 gigs in after the upgrade and didn't notice any difference. When Vista hit it was barely functional with 6. Win 7 fixed that so it worked with 4 again. Hell, I've got an old AthlonX2 5600 I play Streetfighter IV on that's only got 3. Basically, there's not a lot of demand.

Re:Win 10

[Superadnim]

It is a bit like anything it gets better and cheaper as time goes by [lightrabbit.co.uk]

Re:Win 10

[tompaulco]

is fine with 4. I put another 2 gigs in after the upgrade and didn't notice any difference. When Vista hit it was barely functional with 6. Win 7 fixed that so it worked with 4 again. Hell, I've got an old AthlonX2 5600 I play Streetfighter IV on that's only got 3. Basically, there's not a lot of demand.

I think it is disgusting that we think it is just awesome for an OS to ONLY need 4 GB.

Re:Win 10

[__aaclcg7560]

As my college instructor said when explaining the 32-bit CPU in the early 1993, 4GB is enough for everyone. I topped out at 4GB when I rebuilt my PC for Windows Vista in 2007. My newly rebuilt FreeNAS file server has 8GB and I plan to expand to 32GB as I add more hard drives in the coming years. When I rebuild my Windows PC next year, I'll probably go for 8GB.

Re:Win 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the use is for caching that gets freed when programs need the RAM. What use is RAM that isn't being used by anything?

Re:Win 10

[__aaclcg7560]

RAM drive? Had those back in the bad old DOS days.

Re:Win 10

[squiggleslash]

Windows 8.1 worked fine in "just" 1Gb (my tablet ran it with that, it was a very smooth environment.)

People were expecting Windows 10 to be the "7" to 8.0s "Vista" (boy, is that a confusing sentence.) I think Windows 10 though is the second coming of Vista. I'm hoping "what comes after Windows 10" (I'm not sure how the marketing will go) to be rather more memory efficient.

Technically Windows 10 runs in 1Gb, it's running on the same tablet right next to me. But it crawls. All the smoothness of 8.1 is gone.

Re:Win 10

[SydShamino]

I thought Windows 8.1 was the "7" to Windows 8's "Vista". That makes Windows 10 a "Vista" again.

Re:Win 10

[Mashiki]

If you're careful with the services you setup, you can easily run 7, 8 and 10 on 240MB of ram without a problem. It's the feature creep that starts cutting into ram usage.

Re:Win 10

[redmid17]

If Vista was varely functional with 6 GB RAM, you were doing something very, very wrong or are an extreme use case.

Re:Win 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially when theuy promised 640k!

Re:Win 10

[dbIII]

By that time the Pentium Pro was being designed due to 4GB per CPU not being seen as enough and a 64 bit SPARC was available.

Re:Win 10

[dbIII]

By default Vista did things very, very wrong initially. It couldn't even log into an MS domain without downloading and running a fix from the command line. That was very amusing at a time when MS fanboys were blasting linux for having a command line at all.
After a while and a lot of updates it settled down, using far less memory, doing file copies at full speed and so on. There's still a couple of Vista systems in my workplace used by some people that did an end run around IT to get them - they are sort of usable but make Win7 look like a work of wonder in comparison.

Re:Win 10

[Anonymous Coward]

mismatched memory throws away about 20% of your potential raw memory speed. fyi.

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. good.
never 6.

especially as the subject is... memory is dirt cheap.

Re:Win 10

[QuesarVII]

This is not true at all. Total memory amount can be whatever. What matters is properly loading memory channels in a balanced way. Depending on how you go wrong, and on what hardware, performance hits can be a LOT worse than 20% too.

To match the example, if you had a dual channel memory controller with 4 slots of RAM (2 DIMMs per channel), (2) 2G DIMMs and (2) 1G DIMMs would give you 6GB of balanced memory, assuming you install it correctly (a 2G and a 1G on each channel, ie 1st slot - 2G, 2nd - 1G, 3rd - 2G, 4th - 1G, but this varies by boards)

Re:Win 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto, same experience after win10 upgrade, Asus T100 and HP Stream tablets. I can't wait for these IoT devices based on Win10 ;-)

Re:Win 10

[redmid17]

Regardless of Vista's errors at releast (and through SP1), my point still stands. Vista ran fine with 2 GB unless you were choking the horse.

I made the mistake of buying a laptop with 1 GB and Vista with no downgrade option (no XP drivers). The wifi and sound would just randomly stop working. A fresh restore to factory would be fine. I never could isolate it to one update or anything. Finally after about the 3rd restore and 2nd fresh install, I just disabled Windows Update for about six months.
I hit a wall of Vista at 1 GB due to needing an XP VM for class -- jesus it was awful on 512 MB -- and dropped the cash to upgrade it ASAP.

Re:Win 10

[invictusvoyd]

I can't wait for these IoT devices based on Win10

That event will be called , "Armageddon"

Re:Win 10

[Anonymous Coward]

It's usually not the OS that needs it, it's the user software running on top of the OS. You could run Windows 7 on 256MB of RAM if you wanted to, and Linux and other UNIX-like systems on less than 1MB of RAM.

Re:Win 10

[Cro Magnon]

One of my peeves was that when Vista came out, many PCs had 512MB - with Vista! I thought it was crap with 1 GB. I can only imagine it in half that.

Re:Win 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista was a good OS. I used it for years without issue.

Windows 10 is spyware/adware garbage.

Re:Win 10

[squiggleslash]

Where I was coming from was this:

Windows 8.1 didn't really fix the major problem people had with Windows 8.0 (the lack of a Start menu and insistence on having a touch-oriented Start Screen by default)

People hated Vista because of the slow speed, poor memory handling, and the permission dialogs, all of which were (mostly) fixed in 7 (albeit I suspect the permission dialogs were fixed by the third party developers who stopped doing the things that caused them to come up.)

So 8.1 wasn't really the 7 to 8.0's Vista, it was more of one of the service packs that made Vista more usable later on its life. 10 though seems like... it's a whole new Vista. And 8.1 was a nice tablet operating system even if it was horrible on the desktop, whereas 10 seems to be fairly poor everywhere.

Here's hoping they fix it soon. Otherwise I'm going to have to see if I can restore 8.1 on my tablet...

Re:Win 10

[david_thornley]

I prefer to consider how much the OS memory costs. When I started out, it was at a company with three 370s, and whether to buy another megabyte of memory was a decision made at the vice-presidential level. When I upgraded the memory on my first computer (somewhat later), I was paying only about $120/16K, so I filled the thing up.

How much does 4 GB cost nowadays? It's been years since I bought RAM, but back then it would be well under $50. That makes it equivalent to something under 8K when I first started with my own computer.

Re:Win 10

[mattventura]

Multiples of 3 are perfectly fine if you have a triple-channel memory controller (anything LGA1366).

Re:Win 10

[toddestan]

One of the problems with Vista is that its prefetch (superfetch) algorithm was way too aggressive. So give it 6GB of ram, and it's going to sit there thrashing the the crap out of the disk preloading all your programs/data into all that memory. Even while you're trying to use the machine. One of the things they did in Windows 7 was dial it back.

I ran Vista on a P4 with 1.25GB of ram for several years, and it was surprisingly usable. My theory is that it was enough ram for the OS and a few programs but didn't really leave enough for superfetch to play around with. I also tried installing Vista on a P3 laptop with 512MB of ram. That... didn't work as well.

Re:Win 10

[tompaulco]

I prefer to consider how much the OS memory costs. When I started out, it was at a company with three 370s, and whether to buy another megabyte of memory was a decision made at the vice-presidential level. When I upgraded the memory on my first computer (somewhat later), I was paying only about $120/16K, so I filled the thing up.

How much does 4 GB cost nowadays? It's been years since I bought RAM, but back then it would be well under $50. That makes it equivalent to something under 8K when I first started with my own computer.

4 GB for my computer is about $35. If your price is from years ago, then the price difference is not really that impressive. When they say "why is RAM suddenly so cheap?", I expect that to mean the price has dropped drastically by 20 to 30% in a matter of months. In fact, by looking at this graph, it appears that RAM has dropped by 20-30% since the beginning of the year, but at the beginning of the year, RAM was TWICE as expensive as it was in 2011. The graph is logarithmic, so a little hard to read. But in fact, it looks like in 2011 there was a bottom hit, which we are still sharply above. So again, when they ask why the price has dropped drastically, yet the price is far above what it cost 4 years ago, It seems like the question is kind of moot.

RAM is not cheap

[danbob999]

3 years ago, I bought 2x8 GB desktop DDR3 memory for about $70 CAD. It is now about $100. Where is Moore's law when we need it?
And DDR4 is even more expensive.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats because 3 years ago CAD was worth a lot more.

Now. Not.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Kjella]

Yeah, DDR3 prices hit rock bottom right before Christmas 2013. I was considering upgrading to 32GB just because it was so cheap, but really I had nothing maxing out 16GB. Still don't really, even now running a ton of crap I'm only using 8-9GB and the rest is cache. For prosumer money ($1000) you can even get 8x16GB DDR4 for an X99 motherboard, prices have bottomed out but so has demand for most people too. Faster CPU, GPU, SSD and so on great.... more memory? Meh. I suppose it could be cheaper, but at least on the PC it's not much of the total anyway. It's usually the tablet and laptop producers charging an arm and a leg for RAM upgrades.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Solandri]

RAM has some of the slimmest margins in the computer industry (typically around 1%). So its price is highly sensitive to supply and demand. Manufacturers try to predict how much demand there will be 3-6 months in the future and produce an appropriate amount of RAM. If they underestimate, there's a shortage and price increases. If they overestimate, there's a glut and prices will actually drop below manufacturing costs. But the long-term trend has still been towards lower prices.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[viperidaenz]

You can get 2x8GB DDR3 for around $70USD now from newegg
3 years ago CAD and USD were around the same. $70USD is worth $90CAD now, hence your ~$100

Re:RAM is not cheap

[unrtst]

Came here to same just about the same thing.
Even brought along some facts: http://www.jcmit.com/memorypri...

Price per mb at the end of 2012: $0.0037/mb
Price per mb Sep 13, 2014: $0.0085/mb
Price per mb May 15, 2015: $0.0056/mb

Sure, it fluctuated, but it wasn't a big drop, and definitely not a historical low.
The better question, is why isn't it going down further (especially on larger modules)?

Last time it was above $1/mb was in 2000.
In 2002, it hit a low of $0.19/mb - THAT was a drop.
First time it dipped below $0.05/mb was 2007 (got as low as $0.024/mb that year).
It still hasn't hit another 1/10th the price drop ($0.0025 has never hit).

I'd like to get some more memory, but the last time I got 2x8gb, it was cheaper than it is now. Makes it hard to justify... I've expect it to eventually go down in price, and if I wait long enough, I'll have to get a different format - probably worth waiting at this point anyway (ddr4 instead of ddr3).

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

From SNL:

You won one million dollars!
Yay!!!
Canadian.
Ohhh...

Re:RAM is not cheap

[danbob999]

Still, RAM prices should be lower after 3 years, not the same. RAM is definitely not cheap. We need more RAM than 3 years ago, but the price is the same, or more. RAM is not produced in the USA, so I don't think its value has much to do with the USD. The CAD decreased by about 15% against the Taiwan New Dollar, however.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[danbob999]

There is no 2012 in your table. I am sure it was cheaper in October 2012 than it is now.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[viperidaenz]

Why would it get lower? Are they using newer, cheaper process technology?
Or are they producing the same stuff from the same machines for the same cost?

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

This article prompted me to go RAM shopping; I just orderd 2 more 8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 sticks for $80 + tax USD ($5/GB).

p.s. I paid $110 + tax for identical sticks (same part #) in Dec '12 or Jan '13, which means I really paid $113 for them in today's dollars.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

I once paid $400 for 4 MB of RAM. EDO as I recall.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[aaaaaaargh!]

Oh man, I wish I could get anything from Newegg. Here in Europe it's not fun seeing the USD prices and then the same amount in Euro + 50% arbitrary addition plus 23% tax plus 15 Euro shipping. :(

Not to speak of the constant announcement of great new products who will be available here only 1 1/2 years later for twice the price ...

Re:RAM is not cheap

[msobkow]

And back then, $400 was worth about $1200 today.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it's no cheaper right now! Most decent 2x8GB kits of DDR3 are around $110 or $115 CAD at ncix. That's at most a $5 decrease, and nearly twice of what I paid a couple years ago for the 16GB that's in this PC.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[danbob999]

Because newer technology and Moore's law allows them to produce higher density chips. Less chips = cheaper to make. I don't recall any other 3 year period where RAM prices didn't decrease.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Bing Tsher E]

I paid $600 for a motherboard with a 486-DX 33 on it.

But a few years earlier than that, I paid $400 for a '72 Camaro. It wasn't a good Camaro.

But in that same timeframe I also bought 256x1 RAM chips for about $12 each. Which was quite a low price at the time (they were second-hand pulls)

Re:RAM is not cheap

[gyroheli]

Things never became cheaper in Canada because the dollar was high. When the dollar is low though, American companies love to use it as an excuse to raise the price.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[viperidaenz]

Don't they have a presence in UK, Ireland, Poland and the Netherlands?

Re:RAM is not cheap

[viperidaenz]

Newer technology recently has more of a focus on power consumption than performance.
That doesn't benefit desktop ram modules much.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[CauseBy]

I know you are lying, because I live in America, and there are no companies here.

Sounds like I need to buy memory...

[Tyrannosaur]

I haven't been watching the price of RAM, maybe it's time to profit

Re:Sounds like I need to buy memory...

[DigiShaman]

With regards to the corporate world: The trend for the last year is to purchase all new PCs with 8GB or RAM. Honestly 4GB is the bare minimum once you factor in Windows, Anti-Virus, running browser, and an open MS Office document. And being that you don't just find machines with 6GB, the next best option is to double for 8GB.

OTOH, if someone wants to upgrade their existing machine, I recommend going to 16GB. My time to scope part, install, and validate + the cost you pay for the part = not worth going to 8GB of you plan on keeping the computer around for its remaining lifespan. Don't get me wrong here, I'll sell and install the 8GB kit for you if that's what you really want. In fact, it might be all that's needed if you have free slots available vs pulling all existing modules and swapping with new.

For Adobe junkies, CAD-o-holics, and Devs, You get 32GB. Anything beyond that and you're looking at Xeon based architecture; which BTW is a whole other ball game as ECC memory isn't cheap in comparison.

Erm

[ADRA]

RAM has been getting progressively cheaper / GB for a long time now. I imagine it has a lot to do with improved production, a lot of competition, simple process to switch to competition, reduction of corruption / collusion, etc..

The Eye of the Storm

[sexconker]

It's DDR3 being shuffled off the stage because DDR4 is now well-established.
Prices for DDR3 will bottom out and then shoot back up and plateau, and you won't care until you need to upgrade an old system.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Bengie]

This is also my thought.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[adolf]

Thirded.

I've seen this before, going back to the 72-pin EDO days.

Two years from now DDR3 will be super expensive. Five years from now, it will be be either alarmingly expensive or grey market (new? used? recycled?) product from China.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[ganjadude]

thats exactly what happened with SDRAM chips in the early 2Ks. try and get a 128 mb SD chip for a decent price these days. its cheeper to buy old machines and salvage the ram*

to be fair this was true well over a year ago when i was looking at pricewatch.com more often)

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Mr.CRC]

You can't even buy sockets for older RAMs anymore. I designed a DSP real-time controller platform based on DIMM168 sockets, and it's a good thing I bought two trays of them because now they are gone. Yet you can still buy new production 12AX7 and other vacuum tubes!

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[cpt kangarooski]

Yet you can still buy new production 12AX7 and other vacuum tubes!

Yeah, but try getting vacuum to put in those tubes -- there's nothing available.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Anonymous Coward]

Remembers history, this one does.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Anonymous Coward]

Tubes are huge in the guitar amp area, the "best" amps often have them, and sometimes it feels there's a sense that us people without tube amps are inferior.

I think they're also still popular in some niche electronics that deal with large amounts of power.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[gregstumph]

Ouch.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Anonymous Coward]

That sucks.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Anonymous Coward]

Thyratrons are still the go-to method of switching high current high voltage loads.

Most discharge circuits, such as gas lasers, use them.

Solid state switching is encroaching on the lower end of this range, but for the heavy duty switching tubes are the way to go.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[DigiShaman]

Well yeah, RAM prices have always followed the bathtub curve.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[goarilla]

I think those days are over. There is still a lot of demand for old memory in other markets (embedded). At this moment I can get a stick of 2 GB ram for: 50 $ (DDR), 30 $ (DDR2), 20$ (DDR3). I wouldn't call that super expensive.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Anonymous Coward]

And then it will be expensive since no one is making it anymore.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[goarilla]

OK 512 MB SDRAM 27 Euro's: https://azerty.nl/0-1936-39030....
It's best you look at webshops that hold "(refurbished) server components" for stuff like this.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[goarilla]

You might find something new in the "industrial PC" market but you will pay a hefty premium for the "Industrial" moniker.
Ebay isn't a bad option though. http://www.nixsys.com/isa-slot...

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[Dogtanian]

Yeah, but try getting vacuum to put in those tubes -- there's nothing available.

That sucks.

Was going to make the same joke, but you got there first! Sorry I don't have any mod points. :-/

Not quite

[tom229]

Windows 10 market share is around 6.5%, so it's definitely not that. The bigger reason is that there's no need to upgrade period. Beyond nearly all operating system vendors (from Desktop to mobile) continually releasing worse OSes than the previous version, RAM is no longer the driving factor behind application performance it used to be. For niche applications like simulation work it still really matters, but even the most hardcore gamer is overkill at 16GB regardless of speed.

Re:Not quite

[FlyHelicopters]

6.5% for a few months isn't bad. How many of those would have been new system sales had Win 10 not been free?

Not all of course, but maybe half?

Supply and demand, it doesn't actually take a lot of demand drop the cut prices by a lot. A 3% demand drop might cut prices 10%.

Then there is the fact that we have had enough memory for awhile now. 8 year old Core2Duo systems with 2 GB of ram actually run Windows 10 just fine.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

This ample free-memory tragedy sounds like a job for... JAVA-MAN! He'll re-write some of your svelt, peppy apps in Java, thus re-invigorating a thirst for memory! Jump for joy as you head to the local computer store to buy more memory!

Re:Not quite

[tom229]

I think for a "free" upgrade it's actually quite bad. Windows 7 outpaced it and that was an upgrade priced at a few hundred dollars. Also, many of those "upgrades" to 10 we're before release. They were offering RTM and beta as a free download long before release. This is probably when most power users, and people in the industry got on board. These people are still evaluating and still chasing the newest shiniest thing. Time will tell what the overall verdict is.

People aren't as excited about this new "free" version of Windows as they should be. The reason: most don't like what Microsoft is shoveling. We don't want "the cloud", we don't care about mobile interfaces, SAAS, IAAS, or any of your other marketing bullshit. We aren't interested in a free "upgrade" that further removes user freedom and attempts to monetize their data. We're not morons. You haven't fooled us.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think for a "free" upgrade it's actually quite bad. Windows 7 outpaced it and that was an upgrade priced at a few hundred dollars.

Did we read the same article? In the first month Windows 10 was downloaded 75 million times, while in the first two months, they sold 60 million licences to Windows 7. Even if you missed reading that the comparison was one month to two months, 75 million is still larger than 60 million. Windows 10 outpaced Windows 7 by 2.5 times.

And here is the final paragraph from the article:

75 million PCs running the latest version of Windows is, whichever way you look at it, a victory for Microsoft and the sales so far seem to far outstrip previous versions of the operating system. Whether Windows 10 is still selling at such a rate in a few months time remains to be seen, but the initial performance far exceed Windows 7 and 8.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Many ordinary people just try to squeeze the most out of their previous Win7 PC. Upgrade will bring them Win8/Win10, which is just too much of a change to a worse direction. Who would pay for a new machine which is less usable and contains built in spyware? If MS just would bring a Windows 7.1 with life cycle of 15 years from now, the PC industry would revive in a few months.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dude, 2001 called, he wants his Java joke back...

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

60 million to 75million is crap when you remember there's a 5 year difference there.

And we went from 1 billion computers in 2008. To 2 billion in 2015...

crap doesn't even cover it. beyond pathetic.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but Windows downloads Windows 10 automatically by default.
So there have been a lot of people who purposefully turned off the automatic download to not get windows 10.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

The are pretty much pushing Windows 10 down your throat. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the downloads were from users that didn't know how to get rid of the notification otherwise.
That doesn't say anything about how many were happy with the "upgrade".

Microsoft should just re-release Windows XP and call it Windows 11. It would be their best OS in over a decade.

Re:Not quite

[FlyHelicopters]

Windows 7 was really, really in demand... most people were on XP, not Vista, and were really due for an upgrade...

Windows 7 was a big noticeable upgrade over XP.

Windows 10 is less of a big noticeable upgrade over 7.

Windows 7 also wasn't hundreds of dollars, I paid something like $100 for 3 copies, or about $33 each.

---

I don't think people are rejecting Windows 10 for the reasons you're giving, I don't think the average consumer even knows about them, much less cares. The real issue may be "why upgrade, my computer works".

And when it comes to technology, yes, I'm sorry, but the average consumer is a moron.

Re:Not quite

[jawtheshark]

For all Windows machines I have under my control, I upgraded to secure the upgrade that I'll have to do in 2020 anyway. Then in clicked "go back to Windows 7" (well, actually, I didn't... It's easier to image the disk, do the upgrade, and restore from image).
I did this for all machines I have with an OEM license. For some machines, that run Linux, I even bothered to image Linux, install the OEM that came with it, upgrade, put back the Linux image. Why? Because, those machines might still be functional in 2020. It might not be me who will use it, and the future user might prefer 10, so I like to give the future user that option.

That is quite a lot of work, well mostly quite a lot of time, but that way I have the license, and I can continue to use whatever I like (7 or Linux), while keeping my options in the future open.

Re:Not quite

[avandesande]

You do know that there have been a lot of complaints about Windows 10 being inadvertently downloaded without the users consent. People spending cash > Downloaded .

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

That is quite a lot of work, well mostly quite a lot of time, but that way I have the license, and I can continue to use whatever I like (7 or Linux), while keeping my options in the future open.

Can you? I thought that when you upgraded an OEM Windows 7 license to Windows 10, the old license was considered "cancelled", and so if you tried to reactivate Win 7 after that, you would have problems. Is that so?

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 was a big noticeable upgrade over XP.

After switching I would say that Windows 7 was a big noticeable change. I don't see it as an upgrade.
My main reason for switching was driver support. 64 bit XP didn't have good support in that regard.
With continued support for XP I would rather have stayed there. I don't really think that the changes done to Windows 7 was an improvement.

Re:Not quite

[jawtheshark]

Works perfectly fine and dandy from what I've seen.

Re:Not quite

[jawtheshark]

To be more precise, from what I understand. You upgrade your license (the OEM SLP one or the one on your sticker, which are technically two different licenses. Draw your own conclusion from that and how you can abuse this). During the upgrade process, you get a new product key. This product key, from what I've seen, is the same for every machine that is upgraded. That Win10 product key, for Home, ends with 8HVX7, for Pro, ends with 3V66T. Google that if you want.

What really happens is that a hardware hash is sent to Microsoft during the upgrade process. This hardware hash allows you to use those generic keys in the future (well, depending whether you had Home or Pro... Obviously), which means you can just use the generic ISO Microsoft provides (Finally, an official re-installation ISO! I've been waiting years for that). You can not use those generic keys on non-hashed hardware (Yes, I tried to see what happens). It will not activate.

However, your 7 license will remain fully functional. At least, that's my experience.

What would be an interesting test would be the following: Install Windows 7 in a VM, clone it, but don't run the second instance. Start the first instance, upgrade to 10. Keep it on 10. Now launch the second instance, which is 7 and never upgrade it. See if both remain active. This definitely violates the Microsoft licenses you have, but it would be interesting to see what happens. My prediction: both stay activated, but I'm not sure. I haven't tested it.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

And when it comes to technology, yes, I'm sorry, but the average consumer is a moron.

The average consumer is uninformed, may be ill-advised, and while you can lament that they are not fully engaged and aware, you should not ascribe it to them being moron.

You need not be so judgmental and dismissive.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that when a machine is left alone, Windows will "stay activated" forever. Especially if you have ValidationTask disabled in the Task Scheduler, the PC won't "phone home", so as far as it knows, it is happy. The question is, when you change enough hardware that Windows says it needs to be reactivated, will Microsoft approve it? It depends on what Microsoft says is, or isn't, an "active" license.

Re:Not quite

[david_thornley]

As I understand it, the downloads are automatic if you don't disable the appropriate update. Installation requires a mouse click in this stupid window that comes up frequently, takes up screen real estate, and sits on top of all the other windows. It wouldn't be hard at all to install W10 by accident.

Re:Not quite

[jawtheshark]

While not an OEM per say, I have done this with a Windows 7 System Builder version. Install Win7 System Builder, Upgrade to Win10, reinstall Win7. I did not do the rollback: an actual fresh Windows 7 installation which then requires activation. The activation of Windows 7 upon reinstall worked just fine. Granted, System Builder != OEM, but still...

Now, whether I could -for example- replace the HDD in that machine and try to install Windows 10, that I don't know. The hash is indeed for the machine you upgraded with all hardware it had at that point. However, for many machines upgrading is not somethiing that will happen (think laptops). I had planned to try such a situation (upgrade with 4GB RAM, nuke, install 8GB RAM and then install a fresh 10 and see whether it activates), but I have only limited time.

Besides, they're so desperate to see 10 adoption, they'll look a lot though the fingers.

I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[gaiageek]

I upgraded my Thinkpad X230 from 8GB to 16GB because it was cheap enough, and because I was occasionally getting slowdowns in Chrome on Linux from so many windows and tabs open.

It fixed the slowdown problem, until recently, when Chrome on Linux decided to simply start crashing after so many (not even that many - maybe 40) were open.

Summary: Latest version of Chrome is total shit on Linux.

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[tom229]

It's probably CPU. Especially if any of those tabs are running flash or HTML5 video. At least that's been my experience. Flash absolutely murders CPU in linux, and HTML5 video doesn't seem to be much better.

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[gaiageek]

The CPU hit is causing the browser to crash? This happens without any video playing, though maybe a YouTube page loaded, not running.

I've just disabled non-essential browser plugins thinking maybe that's a part of it.

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[tom229]

Yes. I've had my Antergos (Arch Linux) install crash to a halt if I stream a couple 1080p videos while compiling some source and running a Windows VM. Many times. It really seems like bad resource management to me, but the catalyst of the problem always seems to be the video streaming. Without the video streaming the other CPU applications conflict with one another but result in poor performance with themselves rather than a system hang.

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that you might have bad memory causing corruption under load, a thermal management problem (cpu or other system chips overheating and malfunctioning), or a video driver issues having deadlocks or crashes depending on the exact timing of gpu and memory access operations.

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a tab problem, I regularly have 100 tabs in many windows on Chrome on Linux, it can be slow starting up. It crashed occasionally at home with my Radeon set up, same number of tabs at work with Nvidia seems more stable. I have 16GB RAM at home and work.
I don't seem to want to close a tab in case I want to read the contents. I wish it would do a firefox and load them on demand.

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[DigiShaman]

Latest version of Chrome is total shit on Linux.

Is there a browser that isn't total shit? Seriously, they're all fucking shit, on any OS! I'm getting tired of telling people of the following "Crashed in Chrome? Try Firefox, or IE" or "Something else just crashed in Firefox, go back to Chrome" and lastly, "That's a compatibility issue within the site, just keep both browsers open for those two different websites".

Standards? What fucking standards??!

Re:I thought upgrading to 16GB would help

[Anonymous Coward]

I love needing 3 different browsers to deal with the various web management interfaces of the devices on our network because none of them are built to be compatible with all browsers.

Notebook shipments . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

FTFS:

Analyst Avril Wu said, "Notebook shipments in the third quarter fall short of what is expected for a traditional peak season mainly because Windows 10 with its free upgrade plan negatively impacted replaced sales of notebooks to some extent rather than driving the demand for these products."

Um . . . maybe folks are just buying Apple and Android critters, instead of Notebooks. Did any "analyst" think of that . . . ?

Re:Notebook shipments . . . ?

[tom229]

That market is already established. There's very little new entry into that garbage. Either you've "converted" to mobile because generally what you do with computing is of little consequence, or you've tried and binned the idea already.

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The average price of a 4GB DDR3 memory DIMM at the moment $18.50"

It is? Newegg is all in the $21 - $23 range. Looking at CamelCamelCamel, it's about the same price it was around this time a year ago.

2x8GB DDR3 is still in the $80 - $90 range, same place it's been for months.

Re:LOLs for Linux, Diss for Doze

[__aaclcg7560]

The last time I rebuilt my PC was for Windows Vista in 2007 and never felt the need to go beyond 4GB since then. My rebuilt FreeNAS file server has 8GB, which is a specialized system that requires more memory as raw storage capacity increases over time.

Not Brazil

[TheDarkMaster]

http://www.terabyteshop.com.br...

Here I continue paying double or triple as usual in a third world country

Re:Not Brazil

[cdrudge]

Isn't a large portion of that double or triple price due to import duties/taxes/fees?

Re:Not Brazil

[TheDarkMaster]

Depends. If you are importing in person, you have approximately 100% taxes and is likely to never receive because of theft at the post office or customs. But if you shop at a local store you still pay twice anyway because the trader takes advantage of the situation and charges the same price you would pay if you bought abroad with the 100% taxes (a very fat profit margin for the local trader).

Cheap, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

In late 2012 32GB of DDR3 memory (8GBx4) was $92 at Newegg. That went as high as $300.

Doubtful for the most part

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 uses memory compression for pages in memory, as memory pressure starts to build. It will keep the page compressed in order to avoid paging to disk. Windows 8 & 8.1 did this to some extent when the device called for it (i.e. a tablet with 1Gb RAM)

Sources:
- https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/Memory-Compression-in-Windows-10-RTM
- http://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/08/18/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-10525/

It might be windows?

[bloodhawk]

It might be windows! or it might be some farted while typing the price in at the factory! or more likely it might be that we are mid migration to DDR4 or that there is a lot of competition with no recent natural disasters impacting production or it might be that memory requirements simply haven't escalated much in the past decade beyond around 4GB for most users or it might be that PC's purchased in the last 5 or so years are still more than powerful enough for anything a user does or more likely a combination of all of the above. What a fucking retarded article correlation DOES NOT equal causation

Get off my lawn, try 50 dollars for 1Mb

[mrflash818]

Back in the days of 386 and 486, 1Mb SIMMs were US$50, each.

Re:Get off my lawn, try 50 dollars for 1Mb

[Anonymous Coward]

Such price retained well through 1993-1995. When pentiums became common it quickly dropped to $10-20 per Mb,

Re:Get off my lawn, try 50 dollars for 1Mb

[Anonymous Coward]

I once paid $70 for a 4MB SIMM for my Mac LCIII and was glad to get in on the sale early because the vendor ran out before the customers did.

Re:Get off my lawn, try 50 dollars for 1Mb

[yusing]

Cheapskate much?? Back in the days of the 8008 and Z80, I paid $200 each for two 12KB ram boards (had to stuff 96 1-k RAM chips into sockets on each). A couple years later, I got two 16KB factory-soldered 'used' boards for $25 each(snort, what a sucker!). 56K bytes total !! NOONE will ever need more than 56KB.

Re:Get off my lawn, try 50 dollars for 1Mb

[Anonymous Coward]

NO ONE. It's TWO words for fuck's sake.

MS shills will try anything won't they?

[Anonymous Coward]

To get you to buy into the "everyone's using NEW Win10" b.s. - it's what marketers call "jumping on the bandwagon" & is a KNOWN psychological attack technique since stupid people want to be accepted and "part of the IN crowd". The source article and summary are EXACTLY that to a tee. fact: Win10's 7% marketshare isn't squat when you toss in preinstalls with new systems and the fact MS shoved it down everyone's throat to TRACK AND SPY ON YOU!

Oh you of short-term memory...

[ScienceMan]

Forgot this? http://www.extremetech.com/com...

Faulty logic

[kuzb]

This is broken logic. Giving away Windows 10 doesn't impact PC sales at all. What IS impacting PC sales is the fact that the need for a more powerful machine is slowing way down. Instead of computers becoming obsolete in a year or two, computers can often go for much longer before they need to be replaced. It's not uncommon to find people who have had the same PC for 5 years now because there's simply no benefit to them to move to more powerful hardware.

Re:Faulty logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just that. Also the fact that performance increases have been diminishing quite allot. We could spend 1.5k on a brand new system and it would be for most tasks averaging out at 7% improvement. It is simply not justifiable in any way to spend so fucking much for very little returns in performance.

Buying a new PC for say ~1.5k and have bring a measly 7% (or rounded it up to 10%) heck even 20% improvement for that big amount of cash is completely absurd. Specially in times the worlds plebs (myself included) are being squashed with the amazing "do nothing to stop tax evasions from big corp to off-shore fiscal tax havens", save the banks and hide the real unemployment figures while upping taxes for the low and mid class to 20%+.

Yeah. Cheap.... Hah! and as previous a poster mentioned RAM is not "suddenly" "so cheap". it's still ~50% more expensive than it was ~3 years ago. So no. It is suddenly insignificantly less expensive, but still more expensive than ever. And i'm just going by DDR3 numbers.

Re:Faulty logic

[DigiShaman]

This! Although aside from RAM and Storage upgrades, components do wear out; specifically the PSU and electrolytic capacitors. And of course, Windows XP has been deprecated and eventually Windows 7 too (but not for quite awhile now). So at some point, the computer is going to be replaced even if the owner is pleased with the existing performance.

^Proof stupid people can have lower slashdot ids

[Anonymous Coward]

"Giving away Windows 10 doesn't impact PC sales at all."

One of the dumber statements I've read on the internet lately.
 
You would think people that are probably internet savvy like yourself would know data is available on the internet, like how Vista and Windows 7 both increase PC sales. Windows 8 might have too before it was discovered to suck.

http://www.applianceretailer.com.au/2009/11/BBQUOUZDHQ/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2630397/microsoft-windows/at-launch--windows-7-sales-are-triple-that-of-vista-s-first-week.html

For your information, Windows 7 launch tripled PC sales/

Heh, cheap?

[nichogenius]

Yeah, I loaded up both my Desktop and my Server with 32 GB (4 x 8) of RAM each over the past year... I don't recall it being 'cheap'... but then again, I did buy 32 GB or ram which was a typical harddrive back in the late 90's if I remember correctly.

Free upgrade prompted me to BUY RAM for 6 machines

[williamyf]

Bollocks!!!!!

I have been as of late upgrading the Laptops of my brother's firm, mostly as a favor to mother earth (to keep them out of the landfield, and to avoid buying new ones, increasing resources usage) and as a favor to him.

Sadly, he is a fan of Toshiba (but then again, it could be worse), the models are:
One A1235-S2386, one A135-SSP4108, one A135-S4527, one P200 and two P105-S6062.

All of them were on WinXP (on some, it came, on some, it was a Downgrade). Every single one of them was moved to Windows 10 (with some trickery). Every single one of them got the latest BIOS, an SSD, and more importantly for the article THE FULL AMOUNT OF RAM THEY SUPPORTED (all DDR2, some pc4200, some PC5300).

That means all the machines went from 1 or 1,5GB to 2GB (in the A series case) and from 1,5 or 2GB to a full 4GB (in the P series case).

I, personally use a Mac. My current Air has the full 8GB apple ships, my older MacBook has 6GB from the Original two (and an SSD instead of the original HDD). Again, the fact that OS upgrades are free, does not mean LESS sales of memory.

So, as some other commenters have said, the article has flawed logic, the fact that an OS upgrade is free does not mean that RAM sales volume will diminish. If anything, the fact that the upgrade is free means there is more "share of wallet" available to buy RAM and other upgrades in order to make an upgraded machine more snappy.

Has to be Windows huh, how about the game market

[Trax3001BBS]

released within the last year http://www.metacritic.com/brow...

Skylake with DDR4 just hit

[Joe_Dragon]

So there may be a low right now and DDR4 may go up while DDR3 may go down even more.

Re:^Proof stupid people can have lower slashdot id

[Trax3001BBS]

For your information, Windows 7 launch tripled PC sales/

Most likely from people stuck with Win10, no way out so purchased an older OS that just happened to come with a computer.

Tabs

[ArchieBunker]

You don't need 40 tabs open. I guarantee by the time you get to tab 40 you have no idea what tabs 3 or 19 were even about.

Re:Tabs

[UnknownSoldier]

Just because -you- can't remember more then 7 tabs doesn't meant the rest of us that have 60-80 tabs open are not functional.

One of the best Chrome plugins is the vertical tab management window Tabs Outliner

Re:Tabs

[quonsar]

Besides, it's all porn.

Now here is why it may be relevant to you

[dbIII]

Now here is why the above example may be relevant to you - several popular image editing programs do a lot of operations on the working data from your current image on disk instead of in memory no matter how much memory you have. Put it's cache on ramdisk and some operations speed up by an order of magnitude or more and let other operations happen.
I've seen a machine lock up for twenty minutes rotating a large TIF file despite having a lot of free memory because it was thrashing the disk flat out.

Re:Now here is why it may be relevant to you

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the work of the brilliant dev team over at Adobe.

Re:Now here is why it may be relevant to you

[Holi]

Adobe uses a scratch drive. You can make the scratch drive a ram drive. This ain't news to them.

Re:Now here is why it may be relevant to you

[Arterion]

Maybe I'm not thinking clearly, but shouldn't the operating system employ a robust I/O cache that obviates the need for this kind of tomfoolery?

Re:Now here is why it may be relevant to you

[dbIII]

A cache doesn't help much when the stuff changes, such as in a sort or image transformation operations.

Re:LOLs for Linux, Diss for Doze

[dbIII]

Yes, ZFS will eat whatever memory it can find and give you your files faster in exchange. It's amusing when you grab a file from two days ago and it arrives faster than disk speed.

So... Wait a minute....

[nnull]

So you're saying Microsoft actually did a good thing?

China anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be Windows 10, could it be falling demand for commodities from China?

Clearing

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect? Manufactures are clearing their stock to make room for DDR4. So if you want DDR3 your best bet is to buy them before focus shifts to DDR4.

Re:Free upgrade prompted me to BUY RAM for 6 machi

[thegarbz]

Most people are NOT upgrading Windows XP to Windows 10.
Most people who do the upgrade come from Windows 7 or 8.1. This is significant because Windows 10 needs LESS resources than Windows 7, so unless you buy a new machine theres no incentive to upgrade.

Re:Free upgrade prompted me to BUY RAM for 6 machi

[jrumney]

Sales of standalone memory may have increased from people not afraid to open their PC and insert some more RAM buying more to keep old PCs going for longer, but what the article is saying is that sales as part of a new PC (which for the majority of consumers is the only way they will ever buy RAM) have dropped. The overall effect is that sales of memory has dropped.

Why should 4GB cost more than $20 today?

[guacamole]

4GB was a decent amount of memory for a new PC in 2010. It's now five years past since then. Even $300 smartphones now have so much ram.

You might not need jQuery

[tepples]

I agree with you that there are clean ways to do things in plain ECMAScript 5 and HTML DOM. So long as you don't absolutely need to support obsolete* versions of Windows Internet Explorer, you might not even need jQuery.

* IE 8 and especially 7 cause the most problems, but all currently supported Windows operating systems (10, 8, 7, and Vista) can upgrade to at least IE 9.

Re:You might not need jQuery

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's a good site for pointers in the right direction. I wouldn't personally support anything below IE9, except maybe in a high-paying internal corporate environment. I wish we could get rid of IE9 too as there are still an incredible amount of non-standard bubble gum fixes you have to apply to it in order to get things to work as they should (which in turn breaks compatibility with proper browsers).

Re:You might not need jQuery

[Anonymous Coward]

Just took a look at that first site and I find it to be a poor argument against the use of JQuery. I just checked the installation on my PC and the minified JQuery file (jquery-1.11.1.min.js) is all of 96 kilobytes. That represents a meaningless download overhead on a website even if you host JQuery yourself.

Now, look at the examples from that site showing JQuery calls vs. calls direct to the browser's JavaScript support. In many of the examples, the JQuery calls are much shorter. That ALONE is a compelling reason to use JQuery, never mind worrying about cross-browser support. Why? One of the guiding principles I follow in all software development is: the code I never write never has bugs. Reinventing the wheel is one of the cardinal sins of software development. The cost of JQuery is so minimal that it makes no sense at all to look for reasons to avoid using it.

Re:Free upgrade prompted me to BUY RAM for 6 machi

[Anonymous Coward]

Most RAM sales are with new PCs, not aftermarket.

The first time I bought RAM

[AndyKron]

The first time I bought RAM it was $40 for 64K.

4 gigs is all the RAM you will ever need.

[jellomizer]

I expect that is may be mostly do the fact most apps made today still are created with the idea of 32bit in mind. (For Windows and Linux). When designing software there is a sweet spot where of how much RAM to use, vs how much to read off of slower storage such as a hard disk or download from the cloud, vs. how much you should calculate in real time. As technology progresses and prices changes this balance fluctuates. MS DOS and those old DOS apps were designed around the under 640k RAM. and reading data from the disk. So many of the games were generated via Vector graphics. As the CPU time was fast enough to draw the graphics, vs trying to store bitmaps in RAM, and loading it from the disk. Then once the Faster Accessing of the hard disk came around with larger storage, then you got more bitmapped images, where you can read more complex images and display them faster then it would take the CPU to draw them at that quality level. As well RAM has been breaking the 640k barrier, at this point we can have Windowing information as we now have the RAM to run the application and extra to store the data behind an overlapping window...

Design methods change as technology changes so you code needs to deal with the new balance of technology available in the systems.
Sometimes we call it bloat, but it is about having your program taking optimal advantage of the resources to meet what the system can do.
I have a program I created on the server that takes over a hundred gigs of RAM. It really flies because I have a good portion of the data cached in RAM for quick retrieval faster then it takes to download it from the Database. The app I would have written a decade ago, wouldn't work like this app, because we didn't have the RAM, so it would have been designed with more of creating direct read tables in the database with copies from other data elements, probably using extra disk space, to get things indexed so it will work in reasonable time. As well it may need to have been split across multiple servers.

Re:4 gigs is all the RAM you will ever need.

[Pope]

I expect that is may be mostly do the fact most apps made today still are created with the idea of 32bit in mind. (For Windows and Linux).

Stopped reading right there :P

Amortization of fixed costs

[sjbe]

Why would it get lower? Are they using newer, cheaper process technology?

Largely because of amortization of fixed costs. To build the parts the company has to spend a large amount of money up front on production equipment, buildings, overhead, R&D, etc. Let's call it $1 Billion just for a nice round number. If they just produce on DIMM then to make that money back they have to charge $1 Billion for it. If they make two they cut that in half to $500M each. If they make 1 million of them they can charge $1000 each. So the more units you make the lower the unit price can be. That is the primary reason why products like semiconductors start off expensive and their costs lower over time. By now they have made several million of the chip and the fixed costs have been recouped so the price can get lower even if nothing else changes.

This is why you can get volume discounts on stuff you buy. Bigger volumes allows amortization of fixed costs over more units and results in a lower unit cost.

And yes them might have improved the process along the way to reduce costs.

Re:Amortization of fixed costs

[DarkOx]

Its not quite that simple. So I decide I am going to start making memory. I do all my up front capital investment. Now I have to decide how much of my fixed costs I want to try to recoup per unit. One question I might ask myself in the chip industry is how long will this stuff be in mass market demand. Nobody will want my chips if a new tech comes out that doubles density. My current equipment won't be useful anymore. Now I don't know when this will happen so I am going to probably start off with higher prices, pessimistically assuming the window of viability will be small. My competitors are naturally doing this as well so we can all charge high prices.

Suppose a few years have gone by and there have NOT been any major process improvements. My initial capital investment is paid off. My variable costs have been controlled as well as they can. My contribution margin is maximized fully. I now have every incentive to sell as many units as possible! So its a question of capacity. If can produce 20% more chips running another shift or something I probably will. If I have to cut my prices to sell those chips some, I probably will still do it. On the other hand if I don't have spare capacity, I probably don't want to expand my capital investment into three year old technology. My competition may or may not be in the same position. If all of us are selling all the chips we can produce at current prices, than nobody has any reason to lower prices.

The moment it looks like a new technology is coming down the pike, even if its just a die shrink though suddenly we have inventory to clear..

You must really hate your brother

[Anonymous Coward]

to sell his, his business's, and his employee's data to Microsoft for nothing.

Re:You must really hate your brother

[williamyf]

You mean, moving him to linux? Nice fantasy, and would have made his life easier, but it was NOT going to happen.

I suggested them to use OpenOffice, even installed it for them. Guess what they did after they got the machines?

Install Office 2010. They didn't wait a few weeks for Office 2016. They didn't install Office 2013, no, they went straight to Office 2010.

Try to imagine the reaction if the suggestion was: "Go to linux mint". Was NOT going to happen... :-(

Besides, they have a few windows programs (admin/accounting stuff) they need. Here were we are, Linux support is non-existent, and windows support people are crappy, to say the least...

Just as an example, on the P105, the resident techie installed 1 2GB stick, and left the other slot empty. Q: Why did not take the machine to full 4GB? A: That required a BIOS update, and that was beyond the guy's Kung-Fu. Try to imagine that guy running "A2 Software" under WINE (with NO support from the distributor). Yeah, right! Besides, as I said, my brother would never allow it in the first place.

As a matter of fact, the promise to move them to Win10 was the big draw/carrot for my brother to move his ass and let me do the hardware upgrades, instead of plowing along with those CRAPPY machines (or worse, filling the landfield with them - Remember, I did this for mother earth).

Last detail, In his personal machine (a 17" beast of a laptop, with dual HDDs, and 8GB of RAM), my brother had 8.1, and was HAPPY with it, he is eagerly waiting for 10 his automatic update to 10. So no, linux is a nice fantasy, but is not going to happen for him.

And if you meant moving them to Win7, remember microsoft backported their telemetry crap. The resident techie will not be able to play wack-a-mole with the relevant patches.

As for me, apple forced my hand by not having win7 drivers for the air 2015 in bootcamp. So 10 it is for both machines. From my machines, microsoft will only see me using project, visio, WD Drive check utility, Nokia suite for my old-now-just-used-for-here-maps nokia N9, and Arkam City Origins.

There are 5 more machines to update, but I am not sure He will be willing to pay for the required hardware. The next one for sure is a P35-S6111, that only goes to Win7. It is getting a PATA (for crying uot loud) SSD, and, guess what? 2x1GB DDR-0 sticks.

Re:More ram needed for SystemD

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no point switching to windows, systemd is so pervasive that it is part of Windows now. And it uses all the RAM in the entire universe. So no computers work any more and this thread is a product of your fevered imagination.

Re:LOLs for Linux, Diss for Doze

[Cro Magnon]

I haven't used Linux for awhile, but when I did, most distros out of the box were as memory hungry as Windows. Of course, with Linux you could use something other than KDE/Gnome on lower-end machines.

Windows 10 Is Annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

They have it the wrong way around.

Windows 10 is so boring, dull and a step back in functionality, that I went to Linux Mint instead... A free Windows 10 does not remove the marketing and sales people that are currently wrecking Microsoft.

Unless Microsoft is led by people with strong engineering backgrounds, I will give it a pass, and stick with Linux Mint.

Windows 10 is the reason I have no desire to upgrade... its just another Windows 8 wolf in sheeps clothing.

That can't be right...it is really $200 for 8 GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't believe me? Just check out the Apple store. To upgrade a new iMac from 8 GB to 16 GB costs $200...or is Apple somehow overcharging????

96K times several factors, plus China

[tepples]

I just checked the installation on my PC and the minified JQuery file (jquery-1.11.1.min.js) is all of 96 kilobytes.

I've read that it's common for scripts hosted on separate sites to import separate copies of jQuery so that widgets on the page don't break when a new version of jQuery changes some otherwise unspecified behavior. With noConflict mode, you end up with jquery-1.11.1.min.js, jquery-1.otherversion.min.js, and jquery-1.yetanother.min.js. So that's 96 kilobytes, times a factor accounting for the overhead of JIT compilation, times the number of copies of jQuery loaded into a single page, times the number of tabs open in your browser. It also adds latency to the page load, especially on cellular and satellite. And loading it from Google's CDN causes problems for users in China.

Costs and game theory

[sjbe]

Its not quite that simple.

You are correct that it isn't that simple but I don't think may people want to read about all the gory economic nuances involved. Nevertheless the biggest driver of cost early in the life cycle of a product like a RAM chip is going to be the fixed costs to begin production. The effect on unit costs won't become negligible until quite a lot of units have already been sold. It's not the only factor in play but it's normally the biggest. Once enough units have been sold other factors like the ones you mention tend to become dominant.

Nobody will want my chips if a new tech comes out that doubles density. My current equipment won't be useful anymore.

Old chips routinely continue to get produced long after they have been surpassed by newer/better technology. They don't just shut down production the moment something better comes along. There is a wind down period, often a rather protracted one - sometimes measured in years or even decades. Once the equipment is paid for they can continue to produce the product. Sometimes they'll sell the production once demand falls low enough. I deal with this sort of thing in my work when my customers specify old electronics. I had a customer request a specific Schottky diode that the original manufacturer (Motorola) stopped making 20 years ago and sold the business to a small volume maker. But you can still get the part even today if you had the need.

Re:More ram needed for SystemD

[Hognoxious]

systemd is so pervasive that it is part of Windows now.

I thought it was the other way round.

Could it be Windows?

[Johnny Loves Linux]

Maybe it's Maybelline! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:^Proof stupid people can have lower slashdot id

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you didn't get what was said.