Price Check Q3 2016: DRAM Prices Down Over 20% Since Early 2016
by Anton Shilov on July 25, 2016 12:01 AM ESTSamsung Retains Market Leadership
According to DRAMeXchange, the global DRAM industry earned $8.56 billion revenue in Q1 2016, down from $12.1 billion in Q1 2015 (-29.3%) and from $10.27 billion in the fourth quarter of last year (-16.6%). Analysts have stated that the dropping prices for DRAM ICs and relatively low demand for computer memory as primary reasons for the revenue declines.
With a nearly 30% year-over-year decrease, it is not surprising that all DRAM manufacturers suffered from declining revenue and dropping margins, even though the industry stayed profitable as a whole in the first quarter.
Samsung remained the world’s largest supplier of DRAM in the first quarter with 46.4% of the market (up from 43.1% in Q1 2015), not challenged by its key rivals. Meanwhile, SK Hynix commanded 27.1% of DRAM shipments in the first quarter of 2016, slightly down from the previous quarters. The third largest DRAM maker, Micron, controlled 18.5% of the planet’s DRAM sales in Q1 2016, a significant decrease from 22.5% in the same period a year before.
But Smaller Vendors Pick Up Pace
By contrast, smaller makers like Nanya, Winbond, PowerChip and some other managed to increase their shares slightly in the first quarter of this year. The analysts believe that this happened because they increased their output and could simply supply more DRAM than usual.
Wrapping everything up, it is evident that the transition to DDR4 memory is proceeding rapidly and the industry will produce more DDR4 bits than DDR3 bits later this year. As a result, DDR4 should trend towards being cheaper than DDR3 when the amount of DDR4 will significantly outpace the older technology. It is also noteworthy that Samsung will be able to greatly benefit from its 18 nm fabrication technology in the second half of this year, as its rival Micron is not expected to be ready with its 16 nm manufacturing process before Q4. Thus, Samsung may be able to sell its high-performance and/or low-power DRAM ICs at a premium.
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invasmani - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
The majority of American's that actively live in the northern states most impacted by the Keystone pipeline deal were in favor of it. It's the fault of Obama and democrats who tried to make it into a big environmental issue despite the fact that a pipeline is much safer than railroad transport.catboy - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
tipoo is correct. Corporations scam Canadians with outrageously unfair prices just because they can. Here is a news report about that fact:http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/country-pricing-a-ca...
Of course, that report is not about hardware, but Canadians get price gouged on hardware in the same way as they do on all other products.
I recommend for Canadians to stop buying products from Canadian sellers whenever possible. If enough Canadians do that, then corporations will end the practice of price gouging Canadians.
doggface - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
Same thing happens in Australia. $160 in USD = $350-$400 in AUD.The manufacturers price items much lower in the US to get the buzz from websites like these. Then mark it up in lower volume countries.
Another example. $US600 for GTX1080 = $AUD1150
Sure. Our dollar is lower. But it doesnt account for the massive discrepency. We call it the Australia tax
Arnulf - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
I find it intriguing that Samsung has been producing complex circuits on 14 nm node for some time now yet they are only switching to 18 nm for DRAM production (which should be more dense).DanNeely - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Somewhere around half a DRAM die is made up of analog components used to terminate signals on the database; and unlike the digital circuits in the ram cells themselves analog components scale minimally with process shrinks. As a result DRAM gets less of a benefit from process improvements than things like CPUs/GPUs/Flash that are almost all digital components on the die. The analog penalty has gotten worse with each new generation of DDR because to keep the data bus stable at higher frequencies the termination components need to be moved closer to the DRAM; leading to a steady migration of them from the mobo to the dimm to the dram chips themselves.p1esk - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Source? Everything is analog of the circuit level.DanNeely - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
It was something I read back when the DDR4 spec was first released so I'm having trouble finding it (will look more later); but analog components are things that aren't transistors eg resistors, capacitors, inductors (also power transistors which need to be a certain size to carry the amount of current that they do or a lot of RF components; but neither of them are a factor here). Physical size is a major component in how they perform. ex Make a capacitor half as large and all other things equal it's capacitance is only half as great.It's one of the factors behind why the minimum size dimm goes up every time there's a new process. The lower capacity dram chips see the least shrinkage because the largest fraction of their die is signal termination components that don't shrink much.
yuhong - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
I guess that is why they often eventually drop things like x4 configurations when moving older DRAM like 1Gbit DDR2 to newer processes.jardows2 - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
I built my current computer in 2102, and purchased 8 (2x4) gigs of DDR3-1600 RAM. Thinking I could eventually upgrade to 16 gigs if needed, but then memory prices shot up. I can finally purchase the same RAM I did 4 years ago at a slightly lower price, instead of a significantly higher (at times was double what I paid) price!bananaforscale - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
I built mine in late 2011 and bought 4x4 GB of DDR3-1600. Decided to upgrade the memory past winter, the price per GB was still about the same for the DIMMs I used, but doubling the amount and buying faster memory wasn't that much more expensive -> went from 16 GB 1600 to 32 GB 2133 (except the CPU only supports 1866 but whatevs) and distributed the old memory among less important hardware.