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IC Insights has predicted that DRAM prices will continue to increase this year:
According to IC Insights, DRAM prices will continue to increase even though they have more than doubled (+111%) over the last 12 months. IC Insights predicts that by the end of the calendar year DRAM's price per bit will have jumped a record 40% (or more).
[...] Of course, the record pricing levels are great for our friends at the major foundries. Samsung, Micron, and Sk Hynix are also raking in their own record profits and enjoying healthy margins. We have both DRAM and NAND shortages occurring at the same time, which is great for the foundries, and unless a player breaks ranks to gain market share, we can expect more foot-dragging before any of the foundries increases output.
The booming mobile industry and server markets are exacerbating the issue, so you would expect that the fabs would boost DRAM output. Unfortunately, the three primary fabs (Micron bought Elpida, reducing the number of players) don't share the same vision.
IC Insights indicates that Micron will not increase production capacity, instead relying upon improvements in yields and shrinking down to smaller nodes to boost its DRAM bit output. Sk Hynix has expressed its desire to boost DRAM output but hasn't set a firm timeline for fab expansion (unlikely to occur in the near term). Samsung is as tight-lipped as usual, so we aren't sure of its intentions.
In the 1980s there were 23 major DRAM suppliers, but cutthroat pricing and continual oversupplies eventually led to the wave of consolidation that left us with the current three suppliers.
Previously:
December 2015: DDR4 Memory Prices Declined 40% in 6 Months
May 2017:
DRAM Price Surge Continues
Samsung Set to Outpace Intel in Semiconductor Revenues
July 2017:
Micron Temporarily Suspends Operation of DRAM Production Facility
Samsung Increases Production of 8 GB High Bandwidth Memory 2.0 Stacks
August 2017:
DRAM Prices Continue to Climb
Samsung & SK Hynix Graphics Memory Prices Increase Over 30% In August
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday September 19 2017, @09:01PM (1 child)
Is there anyone on SN who follows this sort of thing with an inkling of when price drops can be expected?
It'd be nice to have an idea when the times, they might be a-changing.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday September 19 2017, @09:48PM
Well, the exascale race should be heating up from around now to around 2023. Supercomputer centers may be building more machines during this period, targeting the 1 exaflops level, and ordering a lot of DRAM as a result.
Businesses are buying into deep/machine learning and there are more chips targeting that. Google with its TPUs, Xeon Phi Knights Mill adding half-precision capabilities, the latest Nvidia Tesla GPUs, GPUs in vehicles, etc. Many if not all of these applications will need DRAM.
Watch the PC and smartphone markets. PC demand had stabilized last time I checked but could fall again, and smartphones may be poised to fall.
But analyzing these trends might be overkill. I was talking about DRAM oversupply in January [soylentnews.org]. These higher prices will eventually result in a glut of DRAM on the market and falling prices, although the same fabs are working hard to meet the insatiable demand for NAND so maybe it will take longer than we'd hope for.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]