from the less-than-$5000-for-a-terabyte-of-RAM dept.
Both DDR4 and DDR3 memory prices are in steep decline, due to industry oversupply following process shrinks and a drop in demand for PCs and tablets:
Just a year ago DDR4 dynamic random access memory (DRAM) was rather expensive and was sold at a noticeable premium compared to DDR3. Today, DDR4 memory modules cost less than DDR3 modules cost a year ago and continue to get more affordable. Next year prices of DDR4 are expected to decline further as manufacturers of DRAM are gradually increasing production of memory in general and DDR4 in particular.
The average spot price of one 4Gb DDR4 memory chip rated to run at 2133MHz was $2.221 at press time, according to DRAMeXchange, one of the world's top DRAM and NAND market trackers based in Taipei, Taiwan. Spot price of a similar memory integrated circuit (IC) was $2.719 in late September and $3.618 in late June, 2015. As it turns out, the price of a single 4Gb DDR4 DRAM IC dropped 38.62% in about half of a year.
Spot prices of DDR3 memory are also declining. One 4Gb DDR3 chip rated to operate at 1600MHz cost $1.878 in Taiwan at press time. A similar chip was priced at $2.658 in late June, which means that the spot price of a 4Gb DDR3 IC dropped 29.4% in less than six months.
The difference between a 4Gb DDR3 memory chip and a 4Gb DDR4 DRAM IC used to be approximately 26.5% in June. Today, a 4Gb DDR4 chip costs about 18.5% more than a 4Gb DDR3 memory IC. Spot prices of DRAM chips directly affect prices of actual memory modules. At present one 4GB DDR4 SO-DIMM costs $18 in Taiwan, according to DRAMeXchange. A DDR3 4GB SO-DIMM is priced at $16.75. For many PC configurations, price difference between DDR3 and DDR4 memory modules is already negligible. Next year it will erode further and the new type of memory will replace DDR3 as the mainstream DRAM for personal computers and servers.
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IC Insights has predicted that DRAM prices will continue to increase this year:
According to IC Insights, DRAM prices will continue to increase even though they have more than doubled (+111%) over the last 12 months. IC Insights predicts that by the end of the calendar year DRAM's price per bit will have jumped a record 40% (or more).
[...] Of course, the record pricing levels are great for our friends at the major foundries. Samsung, Micron, and Sk Hynix are also raking in their own record profits and enjoying healthy margins. We have both DRAM and NAND shortages occurring at the same time, which is great for the foundries, and unless a player breaks ranks to gain market share, we can expect more foot-dragging before any of the foundries increases output.
The booming mobile industry and server markets are exacerbating the issue, so you would expect that the fabs would boost DRAM output. Unfortunately, the three primary fabs (Micron bought Elpida, reducing the number of players) don't share the same vision.
IC Insights indicates that Micron will not increase production capacity, instead relying upon improvements in yields and shrinking down to smaller nodes to boost its DRAM bit output. Sk Hynix has expressed its desire to boost DRAM output but hasn't set a firm timeline for fab expansion (unlikely to occur in the near term). Samsung is as tight-lipped as usual, so we aren't sure of its intentions.
In the 1980s there were 23 major DRAM suppliers, but cutthroat pricing and continual oversupplies eventually led to the wave of consolidation that left us with the current three suppliers.
Previously:
December 2015: DDR4 Memory Prices Declined 40% in 6 Months
May 2017:
DRAM Price Surge Continues
Samsung Set to Outpace Intel in Semiconductor Revenues
July 2017:
Micron Temporarily Suspends Operation of DRAM Production Facility
Samsung Increases Production of 8 GB High Bandwidth Memory 2.0 Stacks
August 2017:
DRAM Prices Continue to Climb
Samsung & SK Hynix Graphics Memory Prices Increase Over 30% In August
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 21 2015, @04:26AM
Despite falling DDR3 prices, the Crucial's 64 GB kit for my Supermicro Xeon motherboard stayed at $4500.00. Now it's "just" $2,479.
FB-DIMM is better for code which reads and writes to the same memory cell at the same time. Server code typically does not do that but UI code or numerical code might.
"Mike, please turn your space heater off before you go to sleep. It could catch fire."
"That's not a space heater Mom, it's a Xeon box."
Then later:
"Mike, could you show me how to perform an orderly shutdown of your space heater?"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 21 2015, @05:44AM
If you want enterprise quality RAM you're going to pay enterprise prices. But that product [wikipedia.org] is done for anyway:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday December 21 2015, @10:09AM
FB-DIMM is for those who don't give a flying fig how much their RAM costs, or don't mind bending over to take the punishment. For systems with really gigantic RAM, like 512 GB to terabytes, it doesn't have any competition.
For all other systems; certainly up to 32 GB, and 64 GB with Sky Lake; even pro quality server and workstation motherboards use UDIMM or RDIMM, which is only minimally more $ than regular UDIMM.
I would get rid of that loser Supermicro that requires solid gold RAM, and replace it with a good RDIMM or UDIMM motherboard. Technology has marched on, and you can get dynamite E3 Xeons and up to 64 GB of RAM (ECC if you want it) for (comparatively) a song nowdays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @04:30AM
According to ars [arstechnica.com].
I've been shopping for a Core M laptop.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 21 2015, @05:36AM
Yeah, I think the only Skylake [wikipedia.org] chips that support both DDR3 and DDR4 are the H and S mobile chips, and most if not all of the desktop chips (Pentium G4520 and G4400 for instance support DDR4). Kind of odd that there are no Y, U, and Core M chips that support DDR4 given that it can use less power than DDR3L, and even DDR3U [wikipedia.org], a 1.25V variant I hadn't heard of.
I expect 2016's Kaby Lake should be about the same as Skylake for variants and memory support. Ooh, the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] lists Intel Optane (3D XPoint) support.
Luckily, DDR3 prices have dropped as the story says. You can get 2 x 8 GB, 1.35V, 1600 MHz DDR3 [slickdeals.net] for just $60.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @06:09PM
I thought core M was their marketing for "really fast peak speeds that you won't see often because the heat generated causes a severe problem that requires throttling it and other components long after the peak is delivered"
I would go for an older generation CPU architecture of the same speeds; they provide more performance if perhaps not as much battery life. I personally have never had to be on the laptop battery for more than a few hours at a time; I've bought the extended batteries to add to that duration.
Selling a turbo boost processor has confused lots of people into thinking they have one speed, when really they have some lower clock no one talks about.
It has caused... well just read about the fallout 4 performance discussions if you want to laugh and cry. People do not realize that the game is not the problem, and blame the software, drivers, everything except for their own hardware. And yet why yes, it does run really good at first but then slows down! damn developers why isn't there a patch!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 21 2015, @09:53PM
Well, Core M is marketed as a premium, fanless mobile chip with performance between Atom and "U" chips. The lack of fan gets it into thinner devices, but it gets close to Ultrabook performance.
Core M is expensive. Power consumption and idle power consumption has improved massively across all mobile chips from Intel and AMD in recent years. When I was looking at Skylake mobile chips in preparation for getting a new laptop, I quickly ignored Core M and looked at the more powerful "H" chips instead. I was disappointed to find that Intel has not released any Skylake mobile chips with GT4e graphics (72 execution units). The best you can find for Skylake is GT3e (48 execution units) under the names Intel Iris Graphics 540 or 550. AFAIK, claims of "50% better graphics" with Skylake mobile chips refer to GT4e which cannot be found.
Eventually I got a $100 Chromebook with an Intel Celeron N2830 [notebookcheck.net] (22nm Bay Trail-M). It travels easily while my clunky and disintegrating AMD A6-3400M [notebookcheck.net] laptop acts as a desktop.
Now I will delay any laptop purchasing until at least late 2016. Kaby Lake will refresh Intel Skylake, possibly doing as little as raising stock clock speeds by 100-200 MHz on some chips. Like a Devil's Canyon [digitaltrends.com] redux.
I believe that an AMD laptop can be a better deal if you aren't getting a laptop with discrete graphics. And in late 2016, really late 2016, AMD should be releasing Zen [wikipedia.org], which will supposedly feature up to 40% better IPC compared to their Excavator/Carrizo chips. This is believable since their clustered multithreaded technology with 2 "core" "modules" fared so badly against Intel.
So although an AMD laptop could be the smart buy in the $300-$750 laptop segment, it would be crazy to buy 28nm Carrizo when 14nm Zen is out in about 10 months (skipping 20/22 nm). I will wait that long and hope that AMD becomes relevant again.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-performance/2 [anandtech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 21 2015, @05:43AM
Spot price of a similar memory integrated circuit (IC) was $2.719 in late September and $3.618 in late June, 2015. As it turns out, the price of a single 4Gb DDR4 DRAM IC dropped 38.62% in about half of a year.
I know they reverse commas and periods in Europe but shouldn't one or the other of these be a comma? Choose one of:
U.S. style: $2,719 and 38.62%
European style: $2.719 and 38,62%
Unless these chips really do retail for a little over 2 dollars each?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Funny) by fnj on Monday December 21 2015, @05:52AM
Of course they retail for $2 and change. What did you think they were made of, osmium?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 21 2015, @06:07AM
Memory modules for high-end desktop systems tend to get cheaper faster and more significantly than solutions for mainstream PCs. Corsair’s Dominator Platinum 64GB DDR4 quad-channel kit capable of operating at 2666MHz with CL15 latency used to cost up to $1759.99 at Amazon.com early in 2015. By the middle of the year the price of the kit declined to around $1000 and currently the set of four premium 16GB DDR4 memory modules is available for $679.99.
For bleeding-edge stuff, costing over a thousand bucks for computer hardware wouldn't surprise me.
Who lists prices to three decimal places, anyway? I tried looking at the numbers from various angles and none of them made sense. And I didn't want to pore through the entire freaking article.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by N3Roaster on Monday December 21 2015, @06:29AM
Lots of things (pretty much anything that any manufacturer is using as a material) have prices that go out to fractions of a cent. How many chips on a typical stick of RAM? How many sticks of RAM in a production run? Those fractions of a cent quickly become significant.
Typica - Free software for coffee roasting professionals. [typica.us]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @09:56AM
yeah, I was reading thousands too until I found the retail prices afterwards.
I think by "spot price" they mean what it costs to buy it at the factory door, where they'll only sell you a few thousand pieces at once anyway.
then you put in shiny packaging, general PR tax, shipping tax, shipping costs, border tax, "people are stupid they will only buy expensive stuff" tax, and you end up with 18 dollars for something that costs less then 3 dollars to get out of the factory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @03:38PM
Spot price means without a contract. Most systems manufacturers lock in pricing with a contract for 6+ months- in order to reduce cost fluctuations and make forecasting more reliable.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 21 2015, @03:42PM
Not really.
Here's 2 x 4 GB of DDR4 [slickdeals.net] on sale for $35. 8 GB is 16 "4 Gb DDR4 chips" at about $2.19 each, which is lower than the $2.22 figure in the article. Other deals hit similar prices.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @09:14AM
4 Gb = 512 MB
$2.221 for 4 Gb
$4.442 for 1 GB
$35.536 for 8 GB