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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: 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.