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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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).

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

[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.

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.

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: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.