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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?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 24 2019, @03:53PM (2 children)
nvme ssd is an ssd . . . so yeah, you already have it covered. Was pointing out, if you've got a HDD, a SSD is a huge improvement.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24 2019, @05:24PM (1 child)
you will need to get a big boy OS before telling the big kids how to build a computer.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 25 2019, @04:34PM
Define "big boy OS", while I've stuck with Windows for my entertainment. I've tinkered with several distributions throughout the years. I've installed Lubuntu on an old Thinkpad A21m, and I've hacked on Puppy Linux to make a Kiosk for my Library. The future may yet be, SteamOS on my entertainment machine, but we'll see. I've not had the luxury of spending thousands of dollars on my machine at a time, so a major part of my calculations is money. Intel/Apple, pretty much always have been the more expensive option for me. While AMD hasn't been "the best", typically. They have put out good and sometimes even great things for a much cheaper price point. Call me crazy, but I love a company that tries to compete for my money. Beyond that, the advice I've given, is good advice.
Unless you have a specific use case, 64GB of RAM is nowhere in the realm of, yeah, I'll need that some time real soon. VR is about as intensive as it gets entertainment wise and even 32GB of RAM is overkill. Web browsing + office suite, etc. barely gets you to need 4 to 8GB of RAM. You start getting into serious use of Photoshop, Video editing, Encoding/Decoding audio/video, serious compiling for programming, etc, and you're much better off thinking, the more the better as far as RAM is concerned. That is all highly dependent on the software taking advantage of the extra RAM, though.
As much as I like the idea of Linux, FreeBSD, etc. They're more work than they're worth for the moment. At least from a purely, entertainment driven perspective. I don't want to spend 2 hours getting the GPU drivers right, etc. If it's not one thing, it's another, as far as Linux and gaming is concerned. Even, Linux + Netflix isn't a done deal. Now, if I was wanting to only play 5+ year old games, and have a 5+ year old GPU. Then, it might be worth considering, but cutting edge on Linux is quite literally the cutting edge. You bleed, sweat and tears for that cutting edge on Linux. When, it just works (or not) on Windows/Apple.
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"