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Screeech... DRAM! Weak demand hits memory-makers as they slam on CAPEX brakes – analyst
The three DRAM suppliers are scaling back production growth as memory demand falters with no sign of recovery. The DRAMeXchange research outfit has said annual DRAM capital expenditure (CAPEX) growth has gone negative for 2019 as Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron respond to weak seasonal demand in the first quarter and beyond. DRAM prices had risen for nine consecutive quarters until the last 2018 quarter, when they fell 10 per cent compared to the third quarter.
The demand outlook for PCs, servers, smartphones, and other end-consumer products is weak and the threat of a China-US trade war is not helping things. DRAMeXchange expects first quarter DRAM prices to show a 15 per cent fall, and see 10 per cent in the next, and then 5 per cent in both the third and fourth quarters, unless something positive happens, like China and the USA becoming best buddies.
The three DRAM suppliers are locked into some production output growth this year but have scaled back their CAPEX plans and reduced growth expectations as a result of the price falls.
Related: Tsinghua to Build $30 Billion DRAM/NAND Fabrication Plant in Nanjing, China
IC Insights Predicts Additional 40% Increase in DRAM Prices
Samsung Preparing to Build Another Memory Fab Near Pyeongtaek for $27.8 Billion
U.S. Indicts Chinese DRAM Maker JHICC for Alleged Industrial Espionage
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jasassin on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:34AM (9 children)
A $20.00 128GB solid state drive would make much more of a performance increase for most workloads than going from 4GB of RAM to 8GB.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:47AM (5 children)
Maybe, but 4 GB of RAM is very low. I want more than 8 GB in my next machine. I want to see larger DIMMs that are also cheap, so that 32 GB or more per memory module is not uncommon. Falling prices in 2019 are helpful.
We are now living in a world of $100 1-terabyte SSDs, and $/TB is likely to fall further. We'll soon reach the point where nobody is upgrading to an SSD because it is the default (with HDD used for secondary storage).
Ultimately, we may see some new post-NAND technology that can replace both DRAM sticks and NAND SSDs. This along with combining memory and compute units into a 3D package [darpa.mil] could blow existing bottlenecks away and increase performance by orders of magnitude.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @06:05AM (2 children)
The only time I ever use more than a gig or two of ram in day-to-day use is compiling or gaming. Playing video can benefit from more, but at 1080p it doesn't make much difference. 4GB is enough to compile without (much) swapping for pretty much everything (maybe gcc, firefox, chrome, llvm/clang push the limit, but not much else). If you're running a bunch of VMs or using memdisks or rendering video, maybe you need more, but 4GB is more than enough for 99% of users.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @12:29PM
lol, there's never enough RAM for windows, just look at the pagefile, the so-called SWAP of windows. it's like windows cannot imagine running in pure RAM only and wants to check that there REALLY IS a harddisk present in the system every few seconds ...
then i would always take more RAM, but please also increase the channel width.
some xeons have quad channel, which i think means the system can access 4 physical RAM "sticks" simultaneously?
and then there's the "problem" of DDR3: still "lots" of capable systems out there using it, and DDR3 does feel electrical surges (blackouts, brownouts, lightning strikes) mostly just once. so keep them replacement DDR3 coming at the affordable price?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:25PM
I have a few hundred megabytes constantly occupied by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. They're working through the 80 millions (2^80,000,000) right now, and those numbers are so big that holding just one in memory takes 10M of RAM.
Another memory eater is fonts. They didn't use to be much, until the expansion of the character set from the 128 or 256 of ASCII to the tens of thousands of UTF-8, and the move from little bitmaps of 16 bytes or so each to scalable vector true type stuff.
Then there's graphics. It's kinda funny how people just sort of forget about the gigabytes on the graphics card when talking about the memory their box has. 4G of RAM is much less if the PC has embedded graphics without dedicated memory. And of course there goes another few tens of megabytes for a GUI at a nice 2K or higher resolution with at least 24 bits per pixel.
Browsers have become horrible memory pigs. Need half a gigabyte of RAM to keep a full featured browser comfortable.
At least you note that video is memory intensive. Edit some 4K video and see if 4G RAM still feels like plenty.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
4 GB is low? Heck, I have used computers with only *4K* bytes of RAM.
I recall 4k would only hold only the tiniest BASIC programs. Some assembler could do some interesting things, but I/O was usually very limited, so little room for data. Still, that was 4k bytes under ones own personal control and not at the mercy of some company mainframe timesharing system.
With 16K it became possible to do some actual data processing, although programs had to be terse with only the most minimal of features.
With a whopping 64K it was finally possible to make professional, reasonably featured software packages. With occasional graphics too!
128K-512k opened the door for doing more than one thing at once, either using multitasking or resident programs, and you could add built-in help files without using up too much memory. You could spend extra code making programs "friendly". Or even have a full blown GUI. It was now practical to code in higher level languages without worrying as much about coding tight assembler.
640k - well, that stuck around for a while partially due to the limits of the original PC/XT but also because IBM took their time getting a usable OS environment out the door. IBM Topview turned in to Flopview, and multitasking DOS or OS/2 kept dragging out. Meanwhile hacks to extend DOS memory such as EMS/XMS/UMB/DPMI popped up. A few GUI shells for Windows came about, such as GEM, Deskmate, or that toy from Microsoft called Windows - but none of those initially did much to address memory issues. Still, some remarkable programs fit in to 640k.
1MB - 4MB, with this much RAM using a GUI such as Windows, OS/2, or MacOS was now a practical thing to do. This much RAM made it possible to process graphics, process decent sized databases, work with large documents, and do it all in a friendly manner.
8MB - You needed this much RAM to play DOOM without chunking. End of story. :P
16MB-32MB RAM With this much RAM it became practical to run protected mode operating systems on PCs and include networking, similar to those that were once only found on mainframe/minis/servers.
64MB-256MB dealing with large amounts of graphical based document pages (web pages) and with additional CPU speeds, interpreted or JIT languages such as Java or .NET were now practical although slow and bloated compared to traditional application.
256MB - whatever. Honestly, I have a hard time fathoming anything that average people NEED that really should require much more memory than that. Yes, power users and gamers will always be able to fill any infinite amount of RAM or hard disk space they are given. More memory means more possible instances of whatever you were already doing - great for virtualization but not something "normal" people need. Games that are more realistic than going outside? Great, whatever. Process a "webscale" database all in RAM? Great. If you can put 9000 hojillibytes of RAM in your PC, great. Point is, it just hasn't been exciting in a long time, and it is hard to talk about programs that claim to need that much without wondering how much is being wasted.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:26PM
If one does any sort of even minor image editing nowadays 256 MB won't even come close to cutting it. My camera is already "obsolete" by newer standards, yet it has 26-35 MB sized raw images. Programs that can comfortably handle them are currently memory hogs. If one does any video editing, the memory required increases almost exponentially. A lot of it is of course crap that the developer put in for whatever reason (usually it is to make it all shiny looking). We could do with far more "primitive" looking programs that simply and easily perform the basic functions required.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:04PM (2 children)
What about loading the OS to RAM (all it takes is one kernel argument in mxlinux and other live distros), disconnecting the usb key holding it (no way to compromise anything above the bootloader) and do without SSD? Unless you do multimedia or compile huge project. But even in that case the SSD does not get used for system related stuff, saving lots of write cycles.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Monday January 07 2019, @05:12PM
Puppy Linux does it by default, I believe. I used it for quite a while, because of the ease of modifying portions of the OS. Remastering for the win! http://puppylinux.com/ [puppylinux.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday January 08 2019, @12:11AM
I kind of do something like that. I have /var/log and ~/.cache mounted as tmpfs so they go to RAM. I download files to .cache so my downloads don't use write cycles. I'm using Fedora 29, they release lots of updates almost daily including kernel updates, so I don't do updates when available. I'll probably just do updates every two or three months (or maybe not at all) to cut down on write cycles.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A