Memory Price Remains Down, Why Is It so? When is it going to come back up?

[NOX]

Just as we were expecting memory price to go up, it headed south. Price has dropped for 3 consecutive months already. We are now hearing all those horror stories about over inventory, PC sales down turn, and OEM's not meeting Wall Street expectations. Well, we can't help but ask, "What happened and Why it happened ?"
Farhad Tabrizi, vice president of marketing, Hyundai Semiconductors, may be the most qualified to talk about this.

Good Read

 

[Mday]

check the summer.

 

[ragiepew]

let them stay low (or even drop a bit more) for another month or so... well until I get my hands on 256 more MB... Mem prices are like gas prices... when they are low... it rocks for the consumer but sucks for the oil/gas companies... on the flip side... when they are too high, oil/gas companies are living the good life and us consumers are stuck paying close to $2 dollars a gallon =P... ok now, im just venting, time to stop... you know what I mean...

 

[Twilling]

If we could forcast memory price ups and down, we would also have h gift of predicting the weather. Get as much memory as you can afford, if you need more memory. I just bought 256 meg for both my desctops and will purchase another 128 for the laptop.....

 

[fkloster]

Down baby down!

 

[Whitedog]

As has been since the History of PC hardware, prices don't generally go up, they go down. I realize there is a bottom dollar, but for the most part, memory will remain cheap.

I remember a couple years ago when 128 meggers dropped below $1 per meg. I though that would be the absolute bottom dollar. Never would I have dreamed you could buy 256 meggers for less than 100 bux.

I wouldn't be surprised that after 1 gig single sided DIMMS come out (and they will one day) you'll be able to pick up 512 meggers for less than $100. I know 1 GBit chips aren't out (I don't think), but they will and prices/meg(gig) will continue to drop.

 

[Oyeve]

It'll go up when another earthquake hits Japan.

 

[dcdomain]

Japan??? Don't you mean Taiwan???

Well I might just be stupid... thought Taiwan produced the most chips. Anyway, I sure hope you ain't complaining bout the prices. Hell I hope it never goes back up, cuz once we get used to paying these kind of prices for ram, I don't think I could ever get myself to pay anymore for ram.

 

[Ethernet]

I dunno when its coming back up, but right now you can buy 256 Meg PC133 Dimms for Athlon systems for $71!!!!!!!!! TIME TO STOCK UP! Woot! My PC it going to have 768 meg pretty soon! w00t!

 

[NOX]

<< It'll go up when another earthquake hits Japan. >>

LOL

Ethernet,

I may just do 1Gig because it's so cheap, and not because of any benefits in performance.

 

[Ethernet]

IT certainly couldn't hurt, your going to need 512 meg to play Doom 3 in a year anyhow

 

[ragiepew]

ethernet... god lets hope not

 

[NOX]

<< IT certainly couldn't hurt, your going to need 512 meg to play Doom 3 in a year anyhow >>

OMG...are you serious?

 

[jimmygates]

Hrm..Food...or another 256MB from Crucial.com..



Damn guess I'm gonna lose another 10lbs this month..



-Jimbo

 

[Whitedog]

Shoot! I'd LOVE to buy a game that required 512 megs ram to play it.

You know what that would mean? It would be a Fusking AWESOME DAMN GAME!!!! hehehehe

 

[DABANSHEE]

or it could be a MS game

 

[BigLance]

LOL Dabanshee !!

 

[dcdomain]

Damn bloated junk... just got done formatting and reinstalling Win2k cuz it crashed 3 days after I installed it on my new system and refused to boot up no matter what... DAMN MICROSOFT! and yet I still remain loyal... :disgust:

 

[noxipoo]

you are remaining loyal to MS brcause you have to. Theres no choice. you can't play games on other OSes and certainly don't have the choices in software that windows has. All the new hardware drivers are windows only, blah blah. theres no choice.

 

[Degenerate]

Down.....down...


Mabe the competition is pushing is down and there is no reason to rise the prices..

 

[Degenerate]

Down.....down...


Mabe the competition is pushing is down and there is no reason to rise the prices..

 

[CQuinn]

(This is a general timeline, and is not meant to be date accurate)

At the end of 1999, the memory makers were still trying to figure
out what the next step in memory would be, DDR or RAMBUS. Becuase
they were waiting for the standards to be fought out, they kept up
their standard production of SDRAM and made small attempts to
keep up with the demand for the other memory types.

The result is that halfway thru 2000, they found themselves with a
surplus of SDRAM, while they were switching manufacturing over more
fully to the newer standards. So now we have lowering prices on
the outgoing standard SDRAM, while the memory makers try to set the
premium on the cost of DDR and RDRAM. This puts us, the consumers,
in a sweet spot for SDRAM prices until the surplus starts to dry up
(estimated late spring/early summer).

dcdomain, you're not stupid, but you might not remember the spike in
prices that happened after the Kobe earthquake. IIRC, that was when
the factory that made a large amount of the resin used to seal memory
chips burned down.

There was a spike after the Taiwan earthquake as well, but it was
shorter because less overall damage was done to the industry.

Basically, component prices will jump at any opportunity the companies
have to raise prices, but the course of the industry forces prices back
down as the technology ages and it becomes cheaper to manufacture.

 

[Train]

within a year we will be seeing a taste of the next generation FPS games to replace Q3 and UT, and we just might need 512 MB to play them (play them well at least, im sure they will run on less) but that would be cool, by then the top PC's will be over 2GHZ and we all should have at least 800MHZ RAM, and we need to put those puppies to work!