

IPad disrupting global DRAM market, causing chipmakers to lose billions - mikek
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/11/30/ipad_disrupting_global_dram_market_causing_chipmakers_to_lose_billions.html

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Havoc
I find it difficult to believe that the iPad is the root cause of the surplus.

The timeline is all wrong:

>DRAM chipmakers including Elpida Memory and Hynix Semiconductor have lost $14
billion over the past three years

2011 minus 3 years puts it at 2008. Something important did happen in 2008,
but it wasn't the iPad launch.

The fact that the story comes from appleinsider.com doesn't lend much
credibility to the iPad angle either.

~~~
gradstudent
AppleInsider are just parroting a Bloomberg story:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/chipmakers-lose-
bil...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/chipmakers-lose-billions-as-
ipad-challenges-computers-tech.html)

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alanfalcon
The fact that Apple is selling more iPads than Dell is selling PCs in a
quarter was the most striking fact from this article.

Apple really is creating the future of the industry rather than just trying to
keep up with the trends it sees, and that's what makes the company so
valuable.

~~~
sliverstorm
IMO those numbers are not directly comparable. You buy a PC when your old PC
is getting too old; only a portion of the PC market will be buying PCs in a
given month.

On the other hand, the iPad is a new and rapidly growing market segment.

In other words, one is a new growing market, and one is an older stable
market. The numbers will be more comparable once the tablet market is
stabilized.

~~~
fleitz
Also the Dell angle avoids every other PC manufacture. Dell is only ~13% of
the market tops, the volume of PCs is 8 times what the iPad moves. Also, PCs
are a maturing market and it's no longer necessary to upgrade every couple
years, a 5 year old PC probably still works fine for most users.

DRAM issues are probably much more to do with 2GBs being enough for most users
in combination with a lengthened upgrade cycle. Moores law would suggest that
todays users would buy 8 to 16GB of DRAM which just hasn't materialized.

~~~
grannyg00se
Moore's Law relates to transistor density on an IC. As far as I know there is
no suggestion within Moore's Law that attempts in any way to predict consumer
buying patterns or demand.

~~~
lesterbuck
I'm not so sure you can disconnect Moore's Law from market demand. There is
certainly no physical basis for Moore's Law. It is mainly an expression of the
rate of capital investment and business profit cycles. It happens that
spending the Moore's Law rate on R&D and new fabs approximately matches the
profits needed to build the next cycle. If customers stopped needing more
memory, for whatever reason, then the business investment cycle represented by
Moore's Law would quickly come to a halt. Conversely, if there were a
Manhattan Project style crash R&D effort that needed better memory chips, and
lack of profit was no barrier, then the density could improve faster than
Moore's Law for some time.

------
littledanehren
Can we really credit this entirely to the increased efficiency of iPads? There
are lots of usages of RAM--now people carry around cell phones with more RAM
than before. And data centers can make use of tons of RAM--the main constraint
is its price.

Maybe this is actually a result of bad general macroeconomic conditions.
Nobody wants to spend too much money, whether it's consumers or people setting
up data centers. That's always been the case, but we're poorer than before
now, and RAM is one of those things that you can cut down on, or stop
increasing as quickly on.

This news is unfortunate.

~~~
VladRussian
>And data centers can make use of tons of RAM--the main constraint is its
price.

price through several aspects. Among the main constraints is the number of
memory slots (as we have mainly 4Gb and 8Gb RAM modules to work with). And 8Gb
ECC (ECC/registered memory is the only way to utilize more than 4 slots per
CPU) is only recently became reasonably priced (ie. close to 2x4GB). Once the
slots are filled with 4GB modules - throw and replace with 8GB. Painful. Once
filled with 8Gb modules - replace the motherboard+CPUs. With what? There is of
course monsters around - [http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-
mbd-x8qb6-f~ASUPM3AU.ht...](http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-
mbd-x8qb6-f~ASUPM3AU.htm) which require monster priced CPUs :)

So, thanks to manufacturers for the cheap 4Gb and 8Gb, yet if they built the
large overcapacities for these modules instead of gearing up to 16Gb - that
would explain their financial problems.

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mrcharles
So I guess this explains why ram prices have completely crashed, and SSDs are
dropping pretty fast as well.

Good deal, IMO. What's funny about this situation is that Apple charges $200
to upgrade a MacBook Pro to 8gb. I just bought a new 15", and instead of
giving that to Apple, I went and grabbed 8gb of ram from a local shop for $40.

~~~
prpatel
No, actually, SSD's are dropping in price because the flash memory chips they
use have shifted from 35nm to 25nm (not 100% certain on those, but it has
dropped). This means more chips from the same silicon wafer = lower cost.

------
iamandrus
So shouldn't this mean chipmakers should be adapting their business model?

Also, incredible that Apple is selling more iPads than Dell is selling _full
PCs_.

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joejohnson
>> Apple now ships more iPads than all the PCs Dell sells

Wow. I did not know that.

~~~
lwat
Including tablets Apple on track to become leading global PC vendor in 2012

[http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/including-tablets-apple-
on-...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/including-tablets-apple-on-track-
to.html)

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ImprovedSilence
So I understand that prices are falling now, while there is excess surplus.
But the was I see it, down the line, after manufactures stop supplying or get
wiped out, PC's will only become prohibitively expensive, and perhaps some of
the comments from this earlier HN post
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295603>) may hold some truth.

~~~
anigbrowl
It goes in cycles; there's the Kitchin cycle, which deals with inventory
problems, and the fixed investment cycle, which is driven by the need to
replace ageing equipment. The former is more relevant to the consumer
electronic industry given the rapid acceleration of technology over relatively
short timescales as an additional driver of demand.

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omgtehlion
> Less DRAM, more NAND Flash

These guys just silly. They don’t get difference between these types of
memory.

Actually, at the clock speed of iPad’s processor you can’t run programs
directly from NAND, you have to copy it into RAM and only then run it from
RAM.

~~~
ordinary
NAND doesn't replace RAM functionally, but if you're a chip maker, you can
make money from both. If sales of the one drop and those of the other go up, a
shift in strategy (less DRAM, more NAND) is decidedly unsilly. This is
especially true of the two developments are related, which they are: RAM sales
are dropping because there's not a lot of RAM in the iPad, while NAND sales
are going up because (among other reasons) there's an SSD in the iPad.

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pokoleo
FWIW, it's capitalized as an iPad in all circumstances.

~~~
xorglorb
I believe HN automatically capitalizes the first letter.

(I may be wrong, I vaguely remember this conversation going on in an iOS post
a few months ago)

