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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[beerbear]

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

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?

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

Sounds like I need to buy memory...

[Tyrannosaur]

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

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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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: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...