
DRAM Prices in ‘Freefall’ - baybal2
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334411
======
lucb1e
We're still not at 2016 levels. I don't know an equivalent website in English,
so even if you don't understand Dutch, try the Tweakers Pricewatch for RAM
memory[1]: click some products and scroll down to the price chart. The prices
in 2016 were cheaper than now, for example for this set of 16GB Corsair
modules[2].

Prices are coming down to previous levels, but we're not even there yet. To
say they are in freefall is like saying sofa prices are in freefall for being
$900 after they priced it $1500 after initially offering it for $600. Except
that sofas don't get cheaper every year and electronics typically do, so
really, RAM prices are still sky high.

[1] [https://tweakers.net/categorie/545/geheugen-
intern/producten...](https://tweakers.net/categorie/545/geheugen-
intern/producten/)

[2]
[https://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/?ProduktID=458074&deliveryCoun...](https://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/?ProduktID=458074&deliveryCountry=NL)
(PNG)

~~~
mikeash
If you haul a sofa to the top of a cliff and then throw it off, it’s in free
fall even if it started at the base.

It’s great to clarify that prices are still higher than previously, though. I
wouldn’t have known that otherwise.

~~~
tempestn
Kudos for relevantly extending the sofa analogy.

~~~
mikeash
Honestly, that’s really the only reason I made that reply.

------
popotamonga
I keep adding RAM and i keep running into 95%+ usage. Main consumer: Chrome,
just with a few dozen tabs open.

Followed by Android Studio (3GB for a medium project), IntelliJ idea (another
3GB for a smallish project + 15% cpu constantly)

If prices keep going down i'll just put 128GB and call it a day.

Slack takes more than half a Gig with only 5 teams. It's a chat app, what the
F?

~~~
ktpsns
A concept a High Performance Computing professor told me once: A program which
is memory intensive must be slower then one which needs little memory -- just
because load/write operations from the CPU take time.

That's one of the reasons why some bloated contemporary desktop software (i.e.
Slack) feels as fast as its historic counterpart did in 1995 (i.e. our MSN/ICQ
clients back in these days).

~~~
fwip
That's a nice sound bite, but isn't really true. There are many cases where we
increase memory usage for faster software.

Side note, lessons from HPC aren't really that applicable for chat programs.

~~~
NullPrefix
>we increase memory usage for faster software.

We increase memory usage for faster software development.

~~~
larrik
No, lots of algorithms and data structures use more space to provide more
speed. It's not simple laziness.

~~~
tonyarkles
I don’t think that’s what Slack is doing here though :)

I’m totally with you for things that are actually doing serious
numeric/algorithmic work. Matrix inversion runs a helluva lot faster when the
whole matrix fits in RAM. And there are undoubtedly lots of places where you
can use different algorithms for the same problem that can trade off memory
usage and computational complexity.

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
It does happen obviously:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff)

But yes, running another browser + javascript interpreter on a machine that
already has a browser + javascript interpreter running isn't what that article
is talking about.

------
css
Anecdotally, looks like this is somewhat reflected by Amazon prices for
consumer RAM as well (though not quite "freefall"):

[https://camelcamelcamel.com/Corsair-Vengeance-3200MHz-
Deskto...](https://camelcamelcamel.com/Corsair-Vengeance-3200MHz-Desktop-
Memory/product/B0143UM4TC?context=search)

~~~
gruez
more representative sample:

[https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/tr...](https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/trend.ram.288dimm.ddr4_3200.4x4096.6e9d3ca570aad1a34a83084ee0d3da0a.png)

[https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/tr...](https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/trend.ram.288dimm.ddr4_2400.4x4096.8e064e63b928a77d1a19da36890ad1f8.png)

------
orliesaurus
I built my last dekstop in 2015, 16 gb of ram were cheap. Then prices went
ballistics. I am glad it's over, when 32Gb of ram cost like a new CPU you know
something is wrong.

------
jagger27
About time. I've noticed ECC DDR3 prices are falling quite a bit in the used
market, which is great for my homelab.

~~~
lozaning
Im running an old opencompute windmill server I picked up when facebook
surplussed all of theirs, cant recommend the thing enough. 2 nodes with dual 8
core xeons with HT each, 10GB networking and I've stuffed them with ~256GB of
ram, pcie based nvme ssd, and RX480s. Use one as a vm/container host and the
other as a workstation.

Its more like a freight train than a sports car, but i routinely see Chrome
taking up 57 GB of ram on the node I use as my workstation and kinda just
laugh.

~~~
effie
How are you measuring the amount of memory Chrome takes? Do you calculate PSS
somehow? It is quite non-trivial to determine this number, due to the
complexity of memory allocation.

~~~
lozaning
Roughly adding up the amount of memory that all the Chrome processes seen in
the Windows task manager report using.

In hindsight I should have clarified that this was not intended to be a dig
against chrome. I've frequently got hundreds of tabs open, because with the
amount of memory I've got, why not?

~~~
imtringued
Hundreds of tabs shouldn't consume significantly more than 2GB unless you are
running demanding webapps.

------
gumby
RAM has been a terrible business for as long as I can remember (since the
70s). Intel was originally in the RAM business and got out of it early because
it was so horrible. I honestly don't know why anyone even bothers (though of
course I'm glad they do!).

~~~
adventured
Don't tell Samsung and Micron, they've been printing extraordinary profits the
last two years in the memory segment.

Micron went from being a basketcase for years and a relatively cheap
acquisition target for the Chinese (state owned Tsinghua Unigroup tried to buy
them in 2015). To generating a $5b profit in 2017 on $20b in sales. In 2018
that skyrocketed to $14b in profit on $30b in sales, epic margins.

Micron's balance sheet improved from a positive $11.8b in net tangible assets,
to $33.8b in the latest quarter. They cut their long-term debt from $7.1b to
$3.3b over that time.

Samsung has an even larger memory business than Micron. I wouldn't be
surprised if they cleared $18-$20b in profit in 2018 on memory alone.

Amazing things happen to pricing and margins when you consolidate an important
segment down to only three players. If you slash Micron's 2018 profit by 50%,
they'd still only be sporting a six PE ratio presently and would still
generate $7b in profit. Memory will be a tremendous business until / unless
the Chinese bust up the party (as they hope to in the coming years).

~~~
gumby
My point is that you're describing what makes the market so terrible. It's a
commodity product that's stamped out in high volume. The capex is high but
marginal cost is low.

So you get whipsawed by price swings, plus when prices are high, someone with
cheap access to capital (either through government support or simply a period
of secular low rates, as today) can build a factory and demolish whatever
pricing you're getting on your chips.

This is precisely what made Micron a basket case.

If you look at the history of the DRAM business it's been a continuous,
expensive string of collapse and recovery. Where are the Japanese giants who
used to dominate the business? Where are the US titans that used to exist
(Micron itself was a late entry thanks to Simplot's capital). Etc. Think of
the steel business; DRAM is no different except its cycles are faster.

25 years from now we'll all be running cheap East African DRAM from factories
funded with oil money and built in regions of low cost land and lax safety &
environmental standards.

------
mindslight
Sounds like it's time for another round of price fixing.

Hopefully this time they'll just agree to stop making _lossy_ RAM (Rowhammer),
rather than having another fab fire.

~~~
pmoriarty
How many customers are going to pay more for Rowhammer-proof RAM?

If it's not enough to offset the cost of developing it, I'm not sure why RAM
manufacturers would make it.

~~~
mindslight
I mean yes that's the general problem with all counterfeit products - if
they're "good enough" there's no economy of scale for the non-counterfeit, so
it becomes even more expensive. My point was that if manufacturers are seeking
to keep prices from plummeting, then perhaps they can agree to stop competing
so hard on price that they're pushed into undermining the functionality of
their products.

------
rbanffy
These things only happen when I have all my memory sockets full :-(

------
sneakernets
Hearing stuff like this really makes me want to build a PC, but I just know
that as soon as I do, I'm gonna be Moore's Law'd so hard. I simply can't
justify it given how much money is involved.

~~~
snazz
It probably never makes sense to build a computer. It’s normally more
expensive and if something stops working, it can be hard to isolate the part
at fault and RMA it. Buying a prebuilt PC with parts you know are compatible
with your OS generally gives you a warranty so that you can simply bring it
back instead of wasting more time and money fixing the issue yourself.

<edit> I’m surprised to learn how differing others’ experiences are,
especially on the price of the overall system. When I bought my most recent
desktop, I typed in the make and model of every part into PCPartPicker and
learned that I would be saving over $100 by going pre-built.

There were some fair points made down thread about the PSU and mobo, which I
hadn’t really considered. My RMA experiences with a few hard drives versus the
exchange process at my local Micro Center (they swapped the whole thing out
even though I was well past the return period) were night and day, and many of
you must have had the opposite experience to take the stance that you did.

Regardless, I find it interesting how polarizing this issue is and I probably
shouldn’t have written my original comment in such a provocative way (although
it didn’t seem that way at the time). </edit>

~~~
TheCapn
Wut?

Maybe for general purpose computers doing nothing special but its generally
more cost effective to select and build your own PC for things like gaming.

Beyond that, computers are pretty robust. Its pretty hard to select parts that
are incompatible assuming you get a CPU that fits the socket on the
motherboard you buy and you don't go cheap on your PSU. Lots of tools (and
communities) exist to make sure you're selecting parts properly (not overdoing
it on the CPU when you're getting a low tier GPU for instance). I'm not sure
what your OS comment implies because virtually everything will work on most
widely adopted OSes (and if you're running a pretty obscure linux distro I'd
assume you're familiar with driver woes).

I'm more than happy to be corrected, but if you're buying prebuilt you're
likely paying for the parts and the labour involved. Unless the company is
getting steep discounts on volume purchases (which they are only getting for
bottom tier parts) you're not saving money by having them put it together for
you.

~~~
sixothree
My experience suggests otherwise. System Integrators use the same parts I like
but often get them for a discount.

I build my own systems because I like the constant incremental upgrade model.
But when I recently had to help someone purchase a system I found it was hard
to beat si prices with equally spaced hardware.

~~~
zargon
Could you name some of these companies with prices competitive with building
yourself? I'm in the market for a new PC when Zen 2 comes out. I would prefer
to buy the computer instead of assemble it myself, but I've never found the
prices to be competitive.

~~~
sixothree
I worked with a friend who purchased from iBuyPower (shudder). But the
experience turned out fairly well.

But Corsair, Falcon NW, and CyberPower are others.

------
baybal2
2 reasons why it happens:

The industry, the speculators, and the guidance from "smart investor people"
were massively overoptimistic about the AI and mining trends. All those
billions pumped into those niches, failed to translate into datacentre
spendings. Server sales very likely went down in 2018.

And the same for mobile – "AI" phones happened to be a bad sell.

------
billfruit
In windows and in linux(it might be the similar case with OSX also, I haven't
tried it), I find it is not easy or straightforward to set RAM usage
limitations on processes, I wonder why do not the OSes provide the user easy
controls on that.

~~~
sigstoat
that will replace slowness with crashes, as very few programs are written to
survive being told that no more memory is available.

~~~
imtringued
I think crashes already happen but the process that gets killed may not be the
one that caused the system to run out of memory in the first place.

------
pfdietz
What I learned from the comments for this post: don't use Slack.

