Memory Prices Could Fall 20% in 2019

AlphaAtlas

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DRAMeXchange says that DRAM prices could "drop by 15~20% YoY in 2019 due to the weak price trend of server DRAM." The researchers point a finger towards the sluggish smartphone market and an Intel CPU shortage as major contributors to the 2019 price drop. While some manufacturers are trying to slow down expansion, the industry's "bit output" is still expected to increase by 22% thanks to process advances and yield improvements. Meanwhile, flash memory prices are expected to drop as much as 30% thanks to increased 3D NAND production capacity, "fierce" competition, and reduced smartphone demand.

DRAMeXchange now anticipates continuing price decline during the traditional slow season of 1H19. Because of the seasonal headwinds, shipment forecasts for smartphones, notebooks and tablets are fairly conservative for the first half of next year, together with the following-up impacts of China-US trade war. The gap between supply and demand may be moderated if the NAND Flash manufacturers postpone their capacity expansion and transition to 96-layer 3D NAND devices. By 4Q19, the overall production capacity of NAND Flash is expected to grow by 5% YoY, of which the capacity of 3D NAND production would increase significantly by 20% YoY. Hence, for the NAND Flash manufacturers' capital expenditure, DRAMeXchange now expects further downward revision for their spending plans for 2019.
 
From the article: "First, the smartphone market this year may not see remarkable shipments, since the replacement demand for smartphones has been sluggish due to the lack of differentiation among products in terms of hardware specifications."
I read that as "consumers are finally realizing they don't need to spend $800 every year or two for a minor refresh."

And I wonder how much price drop we will actually see in the U.S. Will the memory companies keep prices at current levels (lower price and tariffs generally balance) or raise them another 25% and blame it on the tariff while pocketing the difference.
 
This bodes well. I'll probably bite holiday discount season this year if RAM prices are tolerable.
 
Well. I don't have a DMC nor a TARDIS so...I'm just going to respond to the cards on the table.
 
Not the type of system I was planning on buying. I'm thinking something lighter, like a Xeon D or a low end Ryzen or something like that.

Hum. I hear you. I guess I am curious - why that much RAM without more CPU? I was joking about the monster I referenced, but truly...what's the use case? If you're running a bunch of vms, I'd think you want a similarly equipped number of threads available...
 
B-but, intel said there was no shortage, just high demand

Shortage means something different form Intel's perspective than from the consumer perspective. If intel maintained production or increased production and demand outstripped production, there's no shortage. They made the money they could, and the only thing they have to worry about is shareholders finding out facts and deciding they screwed up and are way under the numbers they should have hit to the point of lawsuits. The answer is they may have upheld their fiduciary responsibility, saw some growth and still did not meet all demand. If this is the case, there will still be a shortage in the market.

Intel claimed they were not missing their production numbers due to their 10nm issues. That may be true while still leaving people sitting in line waiting on parts.
 
Can't they just finish RAM-raping us? I'm so happy for their shareholders, but we'll get the last laugh -- I hope. :rolleyes:
 
I'm looking to build a Threadripping box at some point so this would be nice.
 
Funny because I read an article yesterday that stated Samsung was going to scale back production to keep prices up. Further down it stated that Micron and Hynix might follow suite.
 
Hum. I hear you. I guess I am curious - why that much RAM without more CPU? I was joking about the monster I referenced, but truly...what's the use case? If you're running a bunch of vms, I'd think you want a similarly equipped number of threads available...

I currently have an older dual socket Westmere-EP Xeon system, with two hexacore L5640's. (So, 12C/24T) with 192GB.

I also use this for my large ZFS pool (12x 10TB drives, 2 striped 512GB SSD's for L2Arc (read cache) and 2 mirrored SSD's for SLOG (speeds up sync writes)

ZFS is a great file system, but it likes lots of RAM. For optimal performance I like to make sure it has at least 1GB of RAM per TB of storage, and since I have 120TB of storage....

The remaining 72 GB I use for VM's. I find I'm always tight on RAM, but the CPU's are rarely loaded up at all.
 
I currently have an older dual socket Westmere-EP Xeon system, with two hexacore L5640's. (So, 12C/24T) with 192GB.

I also use this for my large ZFS pool (12x 10TB drives, 2 striped 512GB SSD's for L2Arc (read cache) and 2 mirrored SSD's for SLOG (speeds up sync writes)

ZFS is a great file system, but it likes lots of RAM. For optimal performance I like to make sure it has at least 1GB of RAM per TB of storage, and since I have 120TB of storage....

The remaining 72 GB I use for VM's. I find I'm always tight on RAM, but the CPU's are rarely loaded up at all.

I'm using a dual xeon setup with 24gigs of ram for my media/Plex server. Im running a zfs file system in RAIDZ2 (RAID 6 for reference). 6x4tb drives. Transcoding, though. Your CPUs don't load?
 
Funny because I read an article yesterday that stated Samsung was going to scale back production to keep prices up. Further down it stated that Micron and Hynix might follow suite.

I read that a few weeks ago too. I'll believe this 20% "drop" when I see it.
 
I'm using a dual xeon setup with 24gigs of ram for my media/Plex server. Im running a zfs file system in RAIDZ2 (RAID 6 for reference). 6x4tb drives. Transcoding, though. Your CPUs don't load?

Well, I run a variety of servers on it, but nothing CPU intensive. No transcodes or anything like that.

Here are my max loads for the year:

upload_2018-10-12_18-24-11.png



And here are my average loads for the year:

upload_2018-10-12_18-26-10.png
 
I hope that manufacturers don't scale back production enough to maintain high prices.
If prices do go down I will upgrade from 16GB to 32GB.
 
I hope that manufacturers don't scale back production enough to maintain high prices.
If prices do go down I will upgrade from 16GB to 32GB.

Well All I have to see is the past practice of these companies and It will probably be... "same o... same o"
 
I sense a mysterious upcoming fire, flood, or widespread goat attack on all vendors that will squeeze inventory and keep pricing high.
 
Funny because I read an article yesterday that stated Samsung was going to scale back production to keep prices up. Further down it stated that Micron and Hynix might follow suite.

Was just going to say this. Additionally, some of the NAND that is coming online is from very very low quality suppliers, not the big 4 (Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix, Toshiba).
 
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