RAM prices set to 'free fall'

Not content with merely rolling downhill, the price of RAM is set to drop off a cliff as the PC market slows, according to IHS iSuppli. The average selling price for DDR3 with 2 gigabit density, which is the bellwether DRAM product, is projected to drop to $1.60 in the third quarter, down 24 per cent from $2.10 in the second …

[Arctic fox]

No shit IHS

""A weakening DRAM market will encourage manufacturers to optimise their product mix, moving toward increased production of a higher-margin memory such as NAND flash," said IHS."

Manufacturers will likely move production effort from a sector where sales and prices are falling off a cliff into the fastest growing sector within personal computing and communications. Wow! Such amazing insight! You've got to hand it to the analysts - as masters of the (ig)noble art of stating the blindingly bleedin' obvious they take some beating.

[Tom7]

'scuse my ignorance, but...

What does this mean for buying a 2GB DIMM at Dixons? What is "DDR3 with 2GB density" - is that a 2GB DIMM?

Paris, 'cos there's few things DIMMer.

[Flocke Kroes]

A 256Mbit x 9 chip for $1.60

GB: Giga Byte

Gb: Giga bit

These are spelled wrong so often in consumer marketing materials that it is worth checking elsewhere. (Could be worse: ISP's keep offering me up to 20 millibits per second.) Check you favourate online suppliers for current prices. DRAM is cheap today, but I am sure the price will rise when I actually want some more.

[xlq]

Kelvin-bytes

@Flocke At least they didn't use Kelvin-bytes (KB)!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.......

Who buys their memory from Dixons!

[Asgard]

@"Who buys their memory from Dixons!"

I only have one bit of memory from Dixons.

Its a flag bit that says, don't buy from Dixons. :)

[relpy]

Heh! Leave Dixons Alone

n/t

[A Known Coward]

Hang on a minute ...

Have you actually looked at Dixon's online store lately? It was a huge shock to me after years of ridiculing them and their over-inflated prices but as it stands today, Dixon's is the cheapest online store in the UK for a lot of hardware. Cheaper on some items than Ebuyer, Amazon, Scan, Dabs, CCL et al

For the first time in my life I've bought from Dixons, two items in as many weeks. The first, a Linksys router, was not only £5 cheaper than elsewhere I was able to use a voucher code giving an additional 10% discount. I chose the standard free delivery option and received it in two days. The order for the second, a Samsung 2TB Ecogreen was only placed last night.

I feel dirty praising Dixons, but right now I can't help but acknowledge that they are doing something right for once.

[DrXym]

Once upon a time

I paid £600 for 16MB of RAM.

[Dave Walker 1]

it's a far cry from penny chews...

I remember 1Mb 30 pin SIMMS for £25

I feel old :-(

[SImon Hobson]

Pah, you youngsters

I remember paying £320 for 2off 1MB SIMMs - and that was second hand and considered good value for the time !

Going back a bit further, I can't remember what it cost me for the 1kx4bit chips my first computer took.

[Anonymous Coward]

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

I remember £10 per MB and thinking it was good value...

How times change.

[Jolyon]

Sideways

I paid twenty or thirty quid for a 32k 'sideways' RAM module for my BBC B, guess that will have been my most expensive.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I won't mention

How much I paid for the extra RAM to upgrade my Acorn Atom to a whopping 13k (extra 1k achieved by some nifty soldering....)

[Number6]

Willy-waving

If we're having a willy-waving[*] competition, I remember paying £36 for eight 4164 chips many years ago. I don't remember what I paid for the eight 4116 chips that preceded them.

[*] although this seems to be smaller and smaller, so not quite sure if I'd call it that

[Admiral Grace Hopper]

Let's talk Olde Worlde Mainframes

512 Mb main store upgrade. £1 million. 48 hours downtime.

Old git for obvious reasons.

[George 24]

Once upon of time

A complete os needed only 64 kb....

[kwikbreaks]

Think smaller...

The IBM 360/30 I first worked with had a total memory of 32kB iirc. The DOS operating system was 10kB and if you ran the Power spooling system (print only - jcl went in via a card reader - I don't recall if punch was spooled or not) that took another 10kB. That left 12kB for programs. Some had to be run without Power

[Ken Hagan]

Gigabyte or gigabit

Two gigs for a pound (sterling, natch) sounds a bit cheaper than what I paid last time. Can I really have a 16GB RAM drive for a tenner?

[Luke McCarthy]

Wow

I just checked, you can get 3x 4GB DIMMs (12GB!) for £70 these days. Might be a good time to upgrade the PC again.

[ecophreak]

sounds pricey

Where are you looking at this? I just bought 2x4gb for £30

[JMcL]

Seems incredible, but that is a bit steep

I just bought a new kit last week with 16GB (4x4GB) for about €75. I have to pinch myself sometimes to put those two figures together!

Just for laughs, I went along to the Dell website to try to spec up a similar machine. To go from the base 4GB to 16GB they wanted €470! I think they were also looking for about €200 to upgrade to a fairly bog standard 2TB hard drive. I stopped at this point

[charlie-charlie-tango-alpha]

Pah, call that expensive

Back in 1980 or 81 I (OK, my Department) paid over £17,000 for 96 MB (in two boards, one of 64, the other of 32 MB) for a crappy DRS 6000. Oh, and the system board with a 40 MHz processor cost about 15 grand too.

Excellent value for money from ICL as always.

[Peter Gathercole]

Wow. That would be expensive

because the DRS6000 was launched in 1990! That must have been one hell of a deal getting a prototype system 10 years before the product launch!

In 1980, system memories were being measured in single figure MB count.

When I went to University in 1978, the IBM 370/168, which was at the time supposed to be the most powerful computer in the UK education system (I'm not sure how accurate that boast was) had a total of 6MB of memory. I can't exactly remember what was a lot in 1980, but in about 1984, we paid about £2000 for 1MB of second-hand memory for a PDP-11/34 (before anybody starts, it was in Systime covers, and had the 22 bit addressing feature added by them [not normally an option on a /34], allowing up to 4MB, although we could only afford 2)

[Steve 114]

Expensive

I paid a shilling each for two 1-bit wound ferrite rings encapsulated in clear plastic. Made nice cufflinks, until they were stolen. As a price-per-bit, that's still some theft.

[as2003]

we have a winner

/thread

[Crazy Operations Guy]

Didn't they same the opposite earlier this year?

Maybe I'm going crazy, but I thought they said that the price was going to jump because of the Tsunami/earthquake in Japan.

Unless something has changed, don't Tablets need RAM too?

[Craig 2]

Re: Expensive

You we're lucky. When I were a lad....

[jon 72]

Not surprising really

With the rise of the tablet sales (and corresponding lack of desktop PC and laptop sales) is it any wonder why everybody is trying to unload RAM chips built using format(s) that are rapidly becoming a niche item?

[Isaac Newton]

1 cent(US) per bit

What's with all these prices for newfangled semiconductor memory? When I was in school, a good price for a core memory board was 0.01 USD per bit, so a 4 kiloword memory board (16-bit words) came to about $655US, at a time when the dollar was worth rather more than today.

[MooseNC]

Vendor pricing.

One certain vendor who I deal with at work is selling 4GB DDR3 1333 modules (Desk and Note) for $16.50. There is still a large amount of markup involved in all memory pricing.

[Nights_are_Long]

Pitty,

It's a pitty this won't be passed down to the consumer I don't see 20% dropping of the cost of buying some RAM from Scan or any industrial supply chain any time soon.

[Levente Szileszky]

It's already falling like never before...

I asked for a quote for 70pcs of 8GB ECC FB DDR3 early Summer, it was a tad over $10k...

...and two weeks ago after I requested an updated quote it was around $7k...

...so you sayin' I should wait another month or two, El Reg? ;)

[I understand now]

Bugger

Still languishing on x86 here so cheap ram isnt going to help me, unless everything else drops down too so i can build a new pc

[Anonymous Coward]

Price of RAM

So what about the price of memory?

[david wilson]

Cacheing?

Especially for PCs with old OSes where 4GB (or 3.X GB) is the system memory limit, might there be a worthwhile market for a budget disk controller card that could use some cheap memory as disk cache, and maybe also as a ramdisk for temporary files?

[captain veg]

BIOS

Even where Microsoft's "licensing limit" doesn't apply, it's still the case that many consumer-oriented motherboards have (presumably BIOS enforced) maxima. I've got a recently sourced mini-ATX that won't support more than 8 gig.

-A.

[david wilson]

@captain veg

...which is why a /card/ that was also potentially relatively transparent to the OS might be of some use, whether it's cacheing HD data and/or pretending to be a disk for temporary files for heavy applications.

[mark 63]

@everyone

ee by gum ,

you tell that t' young people of tday, ....

....and they wont believe you!

....nope....

[A J Stiles]

How times change

Back in the Windows 3.1 / 80486 days, I remember buying four 1MiB, 30 pin SIMMs for £20 each and thinking I was getting a bargain.