
"Intel's Skylake CPU and Windows 10 should help drive up PC memory demand."
Oh no it won't, have you had Gartner in again ?
Declining PC sales took their toll on Micron's DRAM revenues, sending year-on-year growth into reverse for its fiscal 2015. Full-year revenues were $16.2bn, one per cent down on fy2014's $16.4bn. Net income of $2.9bn was five per cent lower than the $3bn recorded in fy2014. Revenues for the final quarter in fy 2015 of $3.6bn …
I thought that by now it would be apparent to anyone not at Gartner that Windows 10 isn't going to sell new computers. If anything, less will be sold because past trends were based upon eventual software obsolescence driving new buys in addition to hardware failures. That's what I get for thinking again.
I'm still waiting for real world properties, costs, &c. on XPoint. I'm game to playing the where can I stick the new widget and what might I be able to do with it but without that, it's damn hard to play.
Or for our US readers
The PC Market is going about as fast as Hurricane Joaquim. viz, nowhere fast (6mph)
If PC/Laptop makers were a bit imaginitive they might sell a few more units. There are far too many basically identical devices at the bottom of the market.
Then using SATA even with an SSD is dog slow compared to PCI-E drives. Why not take a leaf out of Apple's book and use them. A USP if I every saw one.
Oh, and stop selling devices less than 256GB capacity. There really is very little money to be made at the bottom of the market.
Then introduce affordable 2TB drives. You might actually sell a shed load and make lots of folding green ones.
That is more likely than increased PC sales. I believe PC sales will be mostly driven by the two factors noted by another poster in the future: general obsolescence (hardware and software) and hardware failure. The PC market is a mature market that is heading towards its natural sales of mostly replacement kit. W10 and new processors are not going to increase sales and at best maybe provide a temporary plateau on the sales slide.
The PC market has always been a tough one, but the one thing that made it profitable in the last 40 years was ever significant improvements in power and capability.
From barely running a spreadsheet with only numbered or lettered menus that were very limited, to animated graphical interfaces that let one use a spreadsheet like a database or will directly tie into a real database, PC's have come a very long way.
Now that the average PC can run a small business, play high resolution 3D games, watch or even make/edit high resolution video, access the Internet and everything on it, all at he same time and make 3D models, what more does the average person need?
Then there is the used market. When I can buy a factory refurbished PC that will do all of the above things for half the price of new, why would I buy new?
And last, but not least, operating systems. Windows has seriously made a huge mistake with 8 and 10. Linux is growing every year and is no longer hard to install, maintain and use. Besides some companies who make certain specialized productivity software that still has no Linux equivalent, Microsoft would already be dead.
It would seem to me that PC makers would be better off selling the virtues of Linux to move their product. The average person will never know the difference.
There's also the stagnant wage growth for the middle class over the last 30(?) years. With the price of almost everything increasing, granted not computers, it's harder and harder to justify buying a shiny new when the old ones keep running especially with Linux being as good as it is now. I recently bought a T420 for $350 Canadian from local computer shoppe with a one year warranty and could have bought one for less on ebay.
Everybody I know wants to spend hundreds on a big computer box so it can run Win10 and suck up their money on a continuous basis.
OH wait nobody I know wants to do that.
Most are asking how to get their phone to do everything and they are tired of me pointing out it isn't a phone. It's a computer and like most computers you can call people with it but unlike a PC it is personal and travels with you.
I blame the fact they completely botched the Crucial website a while back, making it unreadable and chronically slow (I'm not sure my having abandoned buying from them as a consequence is solely responsible for the downturn though!)
Oh - and the fact that their Quidco cashback tracking pretty much stopped working about the same time - that was a nice little extra in my pocket for a while.
Memory and storage maker Micron Technology has revealed a new business model intended to address the volatility in the memory market that has resulted in sharp swings in pricing over the past several years.
Revealed at Micron's Investor Day 2022 event, the new forward pricing agreements enable a Micron customer to sign a multi-year deal that guarantees them a supply of memory at a predictable price that follows the cost reduction that the chipmaker sees during the lifecycle of a particular product.
Micron's chief business officer Sumit Sadana told Investor Day attendees that the chipmaker has already signed up an unnamed volume customer to one of the new agreements, which the company is currently trying out to see whether it delivers on the expected benefits.
A newly formed group is calling for the US to ensure efforts and public funding to boost the nation's domestic semiconductor industry benefits a broad family of stakeholders, not just a few companies.
The Semiconductor Alliance, which took form mid-2021, just got the backing of three major American chipmakers, including Intel – the processor giant that has put itself front and center in urging Congress to pass $52 billion in chip funding. The second latest big supporter, Micron Technology, has also made some noise about the subsidies while we haven't seen as much from the group's third major supporter, Analog Devices.
The question is: does Intel really want to lift all boats, so to speak? Bear in mind that the x86 giant, as part of its comeback plan, is trying to revitalize its foundry business. The success of that effort relies on a variety of companies, big and small, entrusting Intel to manufacture their chips. To get to that point, those companies may well need a helping hand.
Micron Technology is now using AMD's newly announced third-generation Epyc server CPUs to power most of its high-demand applications for designing memory and storage chips.
Ram Peddibhotla, AMD's corporate vice president of Epyc product management, told The Register last week about Micron's decision, and a spokesperson for Micron later confirmed to us that it moved "most of its most demanding" electronic design automation applications to servers with AMD's CPUs last year.
"They have a state-of-the-art, high performance architecture for EDA to get them to design their products [and] maximize productivity for their designers," he said.
Micron expects to resume normal operations at its Chinese DRAM facility in Xi'an later this month despite it being under lock down following a COVID-19 outbreak about two weeks ago.
"We do expect to get back to normal sometime later this month," said David Zinsner, chief financial officer at Micron, during a webcast for the JP Morgan Auto/Tech conference this week.
Micron assembles and tests DRAM at the Xi'an facility. The biz last week said it reduced the headcount and operations at the facility after Xi'an was locked down in December. Samsung, which also has manufacturing facilities in Xi'an, on the same day announced it too had scaled down operations.
Intel today announced a new showrunner for its PC processor business and named its next chief financial officer, who is arriving from Micron.
Gregory Bryant, who as an executive vice-president ran Intel's Client Computing Group, is leaving at the end of this month to pursue "a new opportunity," the chip giant said.
Bryant, who just oversaw Chipzilla's CES launches, will be replaced by Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Her title will be executive vice president and general manager of the client division, which focuses on components for personal computers and other consumer electronics.
Micron is stopping development of 3D XPoint technology and shifting resources into memory products that use the Compute Express Link (CXL).
3D XPoint is the storage-class memory used in Intel's Optane brand SSDs and Persistent Memory (DIMM) products. CXL is an industry standard interface that enables flexible interconnection between compute, memory and storage devices.
Micron president and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement: "Memory and storage are critical to the data economy, and the need for data centre memory innovation has never been greater.
Memory maker Micron has some words of encouragement for those who are still struggling to find the parts they need for a PC build at less than usurious pricing: Supply shortages are likely to be "largely resolved" over the next few months.
That there's an ongoing component shortage in the electronics industry isn't news, particularly to PC gamers. Nvidia's popular GPUs became hard to find back in 2018 with chief exec Jensen Huang blaming demand from cryptocurrency miners. The pandemic only made things worse, and it's still difficult to find ready supplies of both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards at their recommended retail prices - thanks to scalpers buying up what supply there is and flipping them for a quick profit.
There's light at the end of the tunnel, Micron president and chief exec Sanjay Mehrotra told investors and analysts during the company's earnings call for its Q4 of fiscal 2021, ended September 2. "Some PC customers are adjusting their memory and storage purchases due to shortages of non-memory components that are needed to complete PC builds," he explained, seemingly in reference to the scarcity of graphics cards and ICs.
Chip giant Micron has announced a $150bn global investment plan designed to support manufacturing and research over the next decade.
The memory maker said it would include expansion of its fabrication facilities to help meet demand.
As well as chip shortages due to COVID-19 disruption, the $21bn-revenue company said it wanted to take advantage of the fact memory and storage accounts for around 30 per cent of the global semiconductor industry today.
Memory-maker Micron intends to implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in its fabrication plants by 2024.
Designed to keep Moore's Law alive by allowing the fabrication of ever-smaller chip features, extreme ultraviolet lithography is still relatively unusual in the semiconductor industry - helped by the high cost of the required equipment. Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) both have EUV fabs online, and they're going to be joined by Micron - but only starting in 2024.
"We had always said that we monitor EUV progress. We have actually engaged in EUV evaluation. We have had EUV tool in the past," said Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron president and chief executive, during the company's Q3 fiscal '21 earnings call.
Cisco has named Micron as the supplier of solid-state disks that put themselves to sleep after 28,224 hours of operation.
Switchzilla warned that flimsy firmware could fell some of its Nexus 9000 and 3000 devices back in February 2021, and last week issued Field Notices warning that some of its Firepower security appliances also had the problem.
The issue saw devices become unresponsive until restarted, but the problem recurred after a further 1,008 hours of operation.
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