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
Related Stories
A new semiconductor fabrication plant in China could upend the DRAM and NAND industries:
Tsinghua Unigroup, one of the many tentacles of the Chinese state-controlled Tsinghua University, announced that it is investing $30 billion to build a new DRAM and NAND fab in Nanjing, China. The development comes as the company seeks to rapidly expand after its 51% buy-in of Yangtze River Storage Technology, which recently announced a separate $24 billion DRAM and NAND fab in Wuhan, China.
The NAND industry is falling deeper into the largest shortage in its history, and many industry analysts predict that we will experience yet another DRAM shortage in the coming months. Both the NAND and DRAM industries have consolidated down to a few key players, and predictable production output has kept supply and demand dynamics largely balanced for several years. However, a rash of 3D NAND developmental delays have delayed major players, such as SanDisk, Toshiba, SK hynix, and to a lesser extent Intel and Micron, from reaching production projections. These delays are the catalyst for the current shortage, but the entrance of the potentially unpredictable Tsinghua could upset the delicate supply balance, thus causing an eventual glut. The staid semiconductor industry would rather weather shortages than the margin-killing gluts, so the Tsinghua developments are concerning for the established players.
Additional coverage at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tsinghua-plant-idUSKBN1532ED
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
Samsung Preps to Build Another Multi-Billion Dollar Memory Fab Near Pyeongtaek
Samsung has begun preparations to build another semiconductor production facility near Pyeongtaek, South Korea. The fab will produce various types of memory as the market demands, and if unofficial information is correct, the new fab may be larger than the adjacent fab that began operations last year.
At present the upcoming fab is called the P2 Project and it will be located adjacent to the existing fab near Pyeongtaek. Samsung has already started to establish infrastructure for the production facility — it ordered the construction of gas pipes for the new production facility in January and is expected to start other works shortly. ETNews reports that Samsung is looking at investing ₩30 trillion ($27.8 billion) in the new P2 Project facility, but does not elaborate whether the number represents total investments, or initial investments. ₩30 trillion is the total amount of money that Samsung has already invested and plans to invest in its existing fab near Pyeongtaek by 2021. Considering the fact that the P2 is in an early stage of planning, it is unlikely that the company has finalized its investments plans.
Related: Samsung Set to Outpace Intel in Semiconductor Revenues
Samsung Could Boost NAND Production Capacity, WD Intervenes in Toshiba Memory Sale
Samsung Plans a "4nm" Process
GlobalFoundries to Spend $10-12 Billion on a 7nm Fab, Possibly $14-18 Billion for 5nm
Samsung's Second Generation 10nm-Class DRAM in Production
TSMC Holds Groundbreaking Ceremony for "5nm" Fab, Production to Begin in 2020
U.S. Government Indicts Chinese DRAM Maker JHICC on Industrial Espionage; Bans Exports To Firm
The U.S. Department of Commerce [DoC] this week banned U.S. exports to a China-based maker of DRAM. The DoC believes that Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company (also known as Fujian or JHICC) not only uses technologies obtained from Micron, but also threatens the latter's long-term economic viability and therefore could also be involved in activities that are contrary to the U.S. national security interests.
In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Justice [DoJ] has also filed an indictment against JHICC, United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), and several individuals accusing them of corporate espionage and stealing IP from Micron. Between the two, the U.S. authorities essentially sided with claims that Chinese makers of memory have illegally obtained IP and technologies from DRAM makers from the U.S. and potentially other countries.
As a result of DoC actions against JHICC, all U.S.-based (and, actually, non-U.S.-based too) companies will require a special license for all exports, re-exports, and transfers of commodities, software and technology subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). DoC makes no secret that such license applications will be "reviewed with a presumption of denial", so it will be tremendously hard for JHICC to obtain practically everything, including Windows 7 licenses for manufacturing equipment and production tools themselves (ASML has a strong presence in the U.S., whereas Nikon Precision is based in California). Meanwhile, the whole situation is somewhat more complex.
Related: Tsinghua to Build $30 Billion DRAM/NAND Fabrication Plant in Nanjing, China
DRAM Prices Expected to Decline as Much as 30 Percent This Quarter
DRAMeXchange, a division of market research firm Trendforce, announced today that it expects contract prices for server DRAM to decrease by 30 percent compared to Q1 2019 prices. DRAMeXchange previously predicted that server DRAM prices would fall over 20 percent in Q1 but is now making its prediction even more dramatic.
TrendForce's analysts believe that the same issues of oversupply and lower-than-expected demand that affected suppliers in Q1 2019 will affect the market in Q2, as prices fall 15 percent compared to Q2 2018.
They also predict that the consumer PC market will continue to see DRAM price declines of 20 percent in Q1 and 15 percent in Q2.
Previously: Weak Demand for DRAM Could Lead to Price Decreases in 2019
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 Saturday January 05 2019, @01:17AM (1 child)
Time to blow up the factory again. Hey c'mon! It's insured!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 05 2019, @01:52AM
Where's a catastrophic, supply chain disrupting flood when you need one?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:22AM
I think THIS year is my year to put linux on a BRAND SPANKING NEW desktop that actually has real oooomph to it. Hoping to be able to afford at least 16GB of ram.
chuckle chuckle guffaw *snort*-- shit. Just blew protein shake out my nose.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:18AM (8 children)
Computers, as commonly used by the masses, have "good enough" memory already. Plug 8 gig of DDR2 or better in to the mainboard, it will run the worst dog of an operating system (Win10, I think) well enough to play satisfactory music and videos. Gamers might feel a pinch, but I doubt it. When DDRtwentythousand comes out, there will be people who build their rigs for bragging rights, but it just won't make any real life difference to Joe Sixpack.
I could mention quantum - but that word is over used and abused enough. Memory that makes use of quantum physics is going to be out of the price range of all but the upper crust of the 1% for most or all of the lifetimes of any Soylentil.
Memory manufacturers need to produce to sell to academia, and research facilities, and the military. The rest of us just don't need any "quantum" breakthrough in memory. More, history tells us that few people are willing to pay for top notch memory in proper quantities.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:52AM (1 child)
You don't want to mention quantum, but you ended up doing it anyway.
https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/3DSoCProposersDay20170915.pdf [darpa.mil]
If we can make a big jump instead of an incremental step, maybe new applications will become available that will be impressive enough for even Joe Sixpack to want to upgrade. The obvious big jump we can make would be to use a 3D monolithic architecture combining CPU cores with universal memory.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:11PM
As soon as they do, they will "improve" the application and make it require even more memory to function properly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:22AM (1 child)
I'm a developer and gamer and 8GB has been enough for me for years
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:34PM
Same here. The only reason I have 16 is because I also use VMs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @07:58AM
Psssh - all semiconductor devices, including DRAM, are based on quantum mechanics ("solid state physics").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @08:27AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @08:32AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @08:22PM
What you say may be true, but less expensive ram will help all segments, including the phones and tablets crowd.
The last time i refreshed some servers at work, I paid $12K per box for ram alone-- would love for these prices to come down, and higher density ram is probably the path that will get us there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jasassin on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:34AM (9 children)
A $20.00 128GB solid state drive would make much more of a performance increase for most workloads than going from 4GB of RAM to 8GB.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:47AM (5 children)
Maybe, but 4 GB of RAM is very low. I want more than 8 GB in my next machine. I want to see larger DIMMs that are also cheap, so that 32 GB or more per memory module is not uncommon. Falling prices in 2019 are helpful.
We are now living in a world of $100 1-terabyte SSDs, and $/TB is likely to fall further. We'll soon reach the point where nobody is upgrading to an SSD because it is the default (with HDD used for secondary storage).
Ultimately, we may see some new post-NAND technology that can replace both DRAM sticks and NAND SSDs. This along with combining memory and compute units into a 3D package [darpa.mil] could blow existing bottlenecks away and increase performance by orders of magnitude.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
4 GB is low? Heck, I have used computers with only *4K* bytes of RAM.
I recall 4k would only hold only the tiniest BASIC programs. Some assembler could do some interesting things, but I/O was usually very limited, so little room for data. Still, that was 4k bytes under ones own personal control and not at the mercy of some company mainframe timesharing system.
With 16K it became possible to do some actual data processing, although programs had to be terse with only the most minimal of features.
With a whopping 64K it was finally possible to make professional, reasonably featured software packages. With occasional graphics too!
128K-512k opened the door for doing more than one thing at once, either using multitasking or resident programs, and you could add built-in help files without using up too much memory. You could spend extra code making programs "friendly". Or even have a full blown GUI. It was now practical to code in higher level languages without worrying as much about coding tight assembler.
640k - well, that stuck around for a while partially due to the limits of the original PC/XT but also because IBM took their time getting a usable OS environment out the door. IBM Topview turned in to Flopview, and multitasking DOS or OS/2 kept dragging out. Meanwhile hacks to extend DOS memory such as EMS/XMS/UMB/DPMI popped up. A few GUI shells for Windows came about, such as GEM, Deskmate, or that toy from Microsoft called Windows - but none of those initially did much to address memory issues. Still, some remarkable programs fit in to 640k.
1MB - 4MB, with this much RAM using a GUI such as Windows, OS/2, or MacOS was now a practical thing to do. This much RAM made it possible to process graphics, process decent sized databases, work with large documents, and do it all in a friendly manner.
8MB - You needed this much RAM to play DOOM without chunking. End of story. :P
16MB-32MB RAM With this much RAM it became practical to run protected mode operating systems on PCs and include networking, similar to those that were once only found on mainframe/minis/servers.
64MB-256MB dealing with large amounts of graphical based document pages (web pages) and with additional CPU speeds, interpreted or JIT languages such as Java or .NET were now practical although slow and bloated compared to traditional application.
256MB - whatever. Honestly, I have a hard time fathoming anything that average people NEED that really should require much more memory than that. Yes, power users and gamers will always be able to fill any infinite amount of RAM or hard disk space they are given. More memory means more possible instances of whatever you were already doing - great for virtualization but not something "normal" people need. Games that are more realistic than going outside? Great, whatever. Process a "webscale" database all in RAM? Great. If you can put 9000 hojillibytes of RAM in your PC, great. Point is, it just hasn't been exciting in a long time, and it is hard to talk about programs that claim to need that much without wondering how much is being wasted.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:26PM
If one does any sort of even minor image editing nowadays 256 MB won't even come close to cutting it. My camera is already "obsolete" by newer standards, yet it has 26-35 MB sized raw images. Programs that can comfortably handle them are currently memory hogs. If one does any video editing, the memory required increases almost exponentially. A lot of it is of course crap that the developer put in for whatever reason (usually it is to make it all shiny looking). We could do with far more "primitive" looking programs that simply and easily perform the basic functions required.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:04PM (2 children)
What about loading the OS to RAM (all it takes is one kernel argument in mxlinux and other live distros), disconnecting the usb key holding it (no way to compromise anything above the bootloader) and do without SSD? Unless you do multimedia or compile huge project. But even in that case the SSD does not get used for system related stuff, saving lots of write cycles.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Monday January 07 2019, @05:12PM
Puppy Linux does it by default, I believe. I used it for quite a while, because of the ease of modifying portions of the OS. Remastering for the win! http://puppylinux.com/ [puppylinux.com]
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: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday January 08 2019, @12:11AM
I kind of do something like that. I have /var/log and ~/.cache mounted as tmpfs so they go to RAM. I download files to .cache so my downloads don't use write cycles. I'm using Fedora 29, they release lots of updates almost daily including kernel updates, so I don't do updates when available. I'll probably just do updates every two or three months (or maybe not at all) to cut down on write cycles.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:10PM
Its bound to happen at some point with the **constant** release/upgrade/release/upgrade cycle and hardware improvements.
What we have today is more than enough.. people are slowly starting to wake up and get off the treadmill.