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RAM has never been cheaper, but are the historic prices here to stay?
RAM prices are at historic lows. But it hasn't always been that way. If you upgraded your PC's memory in 2018, you might be kicking yourself right now. This writer certainly is. I upgraded from an old, faithful 16GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 to a 16GB kit of Corsair Vengeance RGB 3,000MHz DDR4. It cost me the equivalent of $200 at the time. That same kit today is just $75. What the hell happened? As of mid-2019, prices have finally gotten under control and are currently at an all-time low, making this a great time to upgrade. But is it here to stay?
[...] Ben Miles, managing director of award-winning British system builder Chillblast, explained that "more and more memory foundries [are focusing] on flash type memory to feed the insatiable smart device and mobile phone industries. Turning a DRAM factory into a flash factory or vice versa takes many weeks, so when companies have chosen their path, its[sic] non-trivial to turn it back. When demand outstrips supply, module vendors are forced to stockpile DRAM chips and offer more money to secure stock, driving up prices."
All of this led to a huge increase in RAM prices between 2016 and 2018. Gamers Nexus put together an in-depth report on this at the start of 2018 and showed the near 200 percent increases in price for some modules, both DDR3 and DDR4. Looking at PCPartPicker's historic trend graphs, we can see that early-2018 was the peak for RAM pricing, but that many speeds and kits took many months to even approach a noticeable fall in price throughout the year, only really falling hard in 2019.
[...] "We don't see the current low price of memory being the new normal," Ben Miles of Chillblast said. "As profits fall in DRAM due to abundance, factories switch focus back to flash, so we can expect peak demand in Q4 to see rising prices once again." [Corsair's public relations manager Justin Ocbina] was a little more hesitant to forecast price rises, but he did suggest that other industries were beginning to pick up the slack for the slowing smartphone market. That could lead to rising prices at some point in the near future.
There's also DDR5 to consider. We've heard a lot about the potential capabilities of this next-generation memory for years, and that's something that Corsair will be switching its attention to in the years to come. Ocbina said that from the get-go, it is expected to dethrone DDR4 from its premium, performance spot. That gap will only widen as more kits are launched following the new standard's debut.
"Historic" low prices (that are about the same per GB as in 2012 or 2015)? Nothing DDR5 and a flood, power outage, or nitrogen leak can't fix.
See also: Micron's DRAM Update: More Capacity, Four More 10nm-Class Nodes, EUV, 64 GB DIMMs
Previously: Expect 20-30% Cheaper NAND in Late 2018
Weak Demand for DRAM Could Lead to Price Decreases in 2019
DRAM Prices Will Continue to Decline in Q1/Q2 2019
Huawei Blacklisting Predicted to Cause DRAM Prices to Drop 15%
Related: Manufacturing Memory Means Scribing Silicon in a Sea of Sensors
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @04:51PM (2 children)
yeah, whatever. prices should be lower. the price per GB might have gone down, but it should have gone down more, in direct proportion to the capacities going up. now that i need 16GB to run a desktop without a bunch of BS, the price per GB should be 1/4 of what it was when i only needed 4GB.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday July 01 2019, @06:57PM (1 child)
In skimming through the articles and doing sort of a technical review of what's out there, I wonder if anyone would comment on the following:
1) What's driving the demand these days for memory for the sort of hobbyist who would buy piece parts? High end gaming, like maybe high fidelity flight simulators? More compute intensive stuff like bitcoin mining? Or do power users just like having more space for the OS to work with to avoid loading from slower storage?
2) Is there a good architectural overview of what the typical allowable DIMM configurations on a modern motherboard are? Is something like a Micron 32GB DDR4 DIMM representative of what's state of the art and readily available? It looks like the DQ lines are set up to run on a multidrop bus. I thought that approach was running out of gas, and I certainly don't see how you could hope make the DIMMs in the middle of a main memory data bus run at 6+ Gb/s per pin. Anybody remember RAMBUS?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 06 2019, @08:08PM
16 GB is starting to become a more common recommendation for games. Next-gen consoles will supposedly pack in 16-24 GB, although that probably includes the VRAM.
Anybody could benefit from a RAM drive, and beyond that there are plenty of applications out there that can eat as much RAM as you throw at it. Including the web browser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR4_SDRAM [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM [wikipedia.org]
It's certainly possible to make a 256 GB "DIMM", so the market will probably sort it out eventually.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]