DRAM chip supply to fall short of demand in 3Q14, say Kingston and Nanya

[Devon68]

Found this article on digitaltimes.com and thought I should share it.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20140423PD204.html
I hope the prices wont go up anymore. In December 2012 when I bought my PC I got 8 gigs of ram for 42$, now for that money I cant even buy 4 gigs.

 

[Naito]

How convenient for the corporations; now they can charge even more of a premium after restricting supply. I paid $130 for 16GB 1866MHz DDR3 a couple years back... that very same kit would cost me $200 today....

 

[pigulici]

So, they(manufacturers) tell us, be prepare(aka buy now a lot of ram) because in the future we will rise the price anyway, so for us consumers it is bad anyway you look, for now(not ddr4, not low price now or in the future,...)...

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I voted yes, and please hear me out before you address hate.

If the question was "Do you like DRAM pricing?" I would have voted no. As the question was whether or not it was reasonable I had to vote that it was. There are countless threads related to increased pricing, so I'll keep this short. If somebody out there wanted to secure rights to buying a ton of DRAM they could drive the price back down to more reasonable levels. The problem is two fold:

1) Computer sales figures are down, and have been on the decline for a while.
2) DRAM is tooling up for a switch from the venerable DDR3 to DDR4.

The first problem is an issue of demand. The manufacturers of tablets haven't seen a huge uptick, and neither have traditional desktop manufacturers. It necessarily follows that demand flags, so production flags. It sucks for pricing, but there's nothing we can do about this as individuals.

Problem 2 is less concrete. DDR4 is a long way off, but the changes to manufacturing are costly and time consuming. Shutting down even one line of production pulls both manufacturers and extra workers to the project to get tooling operational. That means less people available to run the DDR3 lines, and less lines to run it on.


I'd say the pricing uptick is reasonable. It isn't something I like, or even understand (given the fact that we are in Q2 and they are predicting a shortfall in Q3). It sucks, but isn't unreasonable.

 

[4ghz]

Was convenient for me as well. I had a new never-used memory pack that I sold for $180 when I bought it new (edit for under $120 originally) a year earlier due to fluctuating supply and demand price. I originally planned on 4x8GB in my rebuilt rig but I decided by the time I needed more than 16GB, it'd be in more than a few years with Windows 9, Crysis 2020 and DDR3 would be obsolete and "slow" technology, and such. I should be fine with 16GB.

 

[TheBrainyOne]

I feel bad for MS. As if being beaten by PS4 in performance wasn't enough of an insult for them.