Component makers have their server chums by the short and curlies Pressure is set to intensify on server makers caught in the vice-like grip of rising components costs and stiff competition for new business. DRAMeXchange, a unit of researcher TrendForce, said the average contract price of server DRAM modules shot up in the first and second quarters of 2017 by 40 and 10 per cent respectively …
Maybe the public cloud sucks it all up?
They also go massively into the RAM-rich smartphones, so production of modules for smartphones has been increased to the detriment of modules used in servers.
However, Forbes says that Gartner predicts:
Now, Gartner has predicted that DRAM and NAND prices could begin to decline next year, while potentially crashing in 2019. There have been some current trends that support this outlook. For instance, over the last two quarters, expenditures on equipment to produce DRAM is up by about 46%. Major manufacturers are also planning to limit memory content on devices. For instance, the DRAM content of the upcoming iPhone 8 is rumored to be capped at 3 GB, much like the current generation iPhone 7 Plus, as the company looks to keep costs in check.
perhaps unit shipments of servers are down (I don't know off hand), but memory chips per server is up. I know all of my servers have 24x16GB memory modules a piece (including the DL380 Gen9s I just ordered yesterday).
Looking back in history, the DL380 G5 for example (about 10-11 years ago) seemed to top out at 8 memory sockets. G6/G7 increased that to 12 sockets, though AMD G7 could go to 24 sockets(I have a dozen of those left).
My G5s back in the day I think were 8 cores in two sockets with 32GB. Now 44 cores in two sockets with 384GB( 384 has been my standard since 2012).
Brexit just cost me another grand and a half, so a thankyou to the 52% out there.
I'm pleased to have been of service.
But, Brexit aside, the UK exchange rate was walking on air anyway. The appalling double deficit (trade and budget) meant that we were paying too little for imports, and buying too much of them. So it may be uncomfortable, but we need to buy less from overseas, and pay more for what we do buy, until (if ever) we start exporting sufficient goods and services to balance the trade books, and the bunglers of government stop spending vast sums they don't have.
Trade deficit figures are mostly useless these days. They worked fine in the industrial age, but not in the information age where more and more of the economy is intangible intellectual property. For example, Apple shows up in the US trade deficit as a negative, but makes tons of money. Their "value add" (software, design, brand, whatever you want to credit/blame for people paying hundreds more than they cost Apple) does not show up as an 'export' in trade deficit terms for phones sold outside the US. The same is true of banking, very little of the money The City or Wall Street makes shows up in the UK/US trade deficit figures.
Worrying about the budget deficit, on the other hand, makes sense. Japan shows us what happens when it gets too large relative to the size of the economy. If the US and UK don't get serious about straightening that out at some point, we're them in a few decades.
Your example of Apple is not a good one because their offshore accounting means that they aren't bringing the money back to the US (for tax avoidance reasons), and then, like many US companies they have to present non GAAP accounts to investors.
Trade deficits do matter, particularly over an extended period of time, because if we keep buying more than we sell overseas, we need to fund that through other balance of payment transfers. As a grand simplification, in the US they just keep selling Treasury bonds to finance their import addiction, in the UK we sell anything we can find - companies, government assets, infrastructure, IOUs, and still we're cash negative on BoP.
Could the DRAM have been slurped by gov't dept's and TLAs, stung by the accusation that they're too slow in processing the staggering amount of data they're accumulating about us proles? Shifting the issue forward from what they were buying to store it on.
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