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posted by chromas on Tuesday July 23 2019, @09:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the Moore-for-less dept.

DRAM Prices to Slide Over 40% in 2019 Because Chip Makers Can't Forecast:

The laws of botched supply and demand forecasting are coming home to roost for the semiconductor industry in 2019 with DRAM average sales price set to fall 42.1 per cent.

The latest ladle of doom and gloom was poured onto the sector this morning by Gartner, days after IC Insights delivered its dark prognosis for chip makers.

"A weaker pricing environment for memory and some other chip types combined with the US-China trade dispute and lower growth in major applications, including smartphones, servers and PCs is driving the global semiconductor market to its lowest growth level since 2009," said Gartner analyst Ben Lee.

Smartphones sales are touted to fall 3.3 per cent to 2.2 billion units this year – the steepest recorded drop in their history. Traditional desktops and notebooks are forecast to drop to 187.2 million from 195.3 million last year. As for servers, the big cloud providers have put spending on pause.

The upshot of this is that global semiconductor revenues are expected to drop 9.6 per cent year-on-year to $475bn. This is down 3.4 per cent on Gartner's earlier forecast and likely could be revised again before the end of 2019 is upon us.

Given the chip makers are facing pricing pressure on memory, I would expect them to try and transition to more profitable markets such as processors. If enough of them have the same idea, are we on the verge of a drop in CPU prices, too?

Or will enough people see the drop in memory prices and use that as justification to upgrade their motherboard so as to be able to support more and/or faster memory — leading to an increase in mobo prices?

To complicate matters even further, Microsoft's Windows 7 is slated to go unsupported at year's end. Will companies install Windows 10 on existing systems or decide to do a hardware upgrade at the same time? How will the promise of a lower energy bill and thus lessened cost of doing business going to factor in?

What are YOU going to do?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Wednesday July 24 2019, @12:09AM (2 children)

    by EEMac (6423) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @12:09AM (#870536)

    When I built my computer back in mid-2018, 16GB of decent-quality desktop DRAM cost $200.I knew it was overpriced, but I needed it at the time. I had to suck it up. Now it costs $70. >:-(

    Mind you, gaming PCs of the previous generation came with 32GB of RAM because it was a cheap way to give your product bigger numbers. ఠ_ఠ

    DRAM manufacturers can get all the payback possible after they extorted the market over 2017-2018, as far as I'm concerned. Congratulations to people who get to build now.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Wednesday July 24 2019, @12:30AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @12:30AM (#870544)

    Yeah, it's remarkable. I built my main PC in 2012. Was going to stick in 8GB, but it has 16 GB of ram because the extra 8GB was like, $35 at the time. I was putting together a secondary Linux box a couple of years ago, figured I'd throw in 16 GB there, because why not? Total sticker shock... well guess I really only need 8 GB....

    I just see ram prices coming back down to where they were before.

  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 24 2019, @04:11PM

    by Freeman (732) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @04:11PM (#870733) Journal

    I got my RAM / built my machine, just before it spiked.

    --
    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"