State of DRAM: Expect higher than ever DDR4 due to the introduction of 8GB RAM in certain "smart"phones...

State of DRAM: Expect higher than ever DDR4 due to the introduction of 8GB RAM in certain "smart"phones. Phone RAM get more fabs and PC RAM always in the end of the line.

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We need to nuke worse Korea.
Fuck DRAM cartel.

Why do droidphones need so much ram?

Android needs a place to store your data before sending it to Google

>tfw your PC is on par with a smartphone's RAM
Fuck it

...

PC market is slowly dying and phone market is growing, but don't forget cloud servers, big data, AI/autonomous driving and IoT. Everything will have memory in it soon.

3DXP will help a great deal if Intel/Micron can start pumping it out with sufficient density and lower power requirements.

If you want to see DRAM and NAND increase in price 10x-20x then nuke SK. Also buy Micron stock as they'd be the only major DRAM player left and one of two NAND players.

It's not a cartel btw, there is no controlling group or agreement between companies. It's the nature of the business and it's shown time and again fab expansion costs everyone money by flooding the market and destroying ASPs, leading to everyone losing money. So spending three years and $5-8 billion in buidling a fab simply to destroy their profits doesn't make a lot of business sense, does it?

I read an article to that effect, where all the big DRAM and flash makers all kinda arrived at a place where they preferred to keep their margins up to pay off previously-built fabs, and as a result none of them really cared to compete on price. That means this is probably going to keep going on for a while until something pushes one of them into fighting for market share.

It's happened many times in the past and is why analysts call the memory market cyclical

>demand outpaces supply
>prices go up
>company A decides to try to take advantage by building new fab (which takes years and billions to make)
>all competitors are now forced to build new fabs to keep their market share
>2-3 years down the road the new fabs come online and supply far outstrips demand
>prices crash
>memory companies go out of business and are purchased for pennies on the dollar by the bigger companies that could weather the pricing crash

We now have 3 DRAM manufacturers that make like 95% of the DRAM and 5 NAND manufacturers where 3 make like 85% of the NAND.

The relatively few players left have all realized building out capacity hurts more than it helps and it seems, this time, they are not planning any rapid expansion by building new fabs or expanding existing fabs but are only increasing capacity via process migration (i.e. increased density)

BTW all of the above makes memory companies great investment opportunities, even after their massive run-ups.

i guess the prices won't come down sooner, even in 2019?

Pretty happy that I got this for $100. Probably should have doubled it though for possible quad-channel.

>It's not a cartel btw, there is no controlling group or agreement between companies

Nice try, sneaky gook.

>“At the same time, changes have occurred in the relationship among the top three suppliers – Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung,” Wu added. “Based on the oligopolistic market situation, the trio have opted for co-existence as the best way to maximize their own profitability. They therefore are turning away from aggressively competing for market share through price reduction and capacity expansion.”
>“In a sense, there a strategic aspect behind the latest wave of DRAM price increase,” said Wu. “In the short term, rising prices lift up margins for suppliers. In the long run, the barrier to keep Chinese competition out of the DRAM market is reinforced.”

press.trendforce.com/press/20161102-2677.html

I've heard second half of 2018 it's going to start to drop. Probably by the end of 2018 more or less normal.

just more excuses for price fixing

every few months they'll come out with another news story explaining why there's a huge shortage (even though you can buy every type of RAM and there are never any actual supply issues anywhere like we had with GPU's going out of stock)

Is there some way to prod the US department of justice into an anti-trust suit against these companies?

They've been saying it'll drop 2 quarters out for over a year now. As of right now there is no reason to think DRAM prices will go down considerably in 2018; prices are currently still rising; contract prices in October were up 7%.

You can follow DRAM pricing on dramexchange.com

I have 64GB in quad channel which I suspected I wouldn't really need but glad I bought it for ~$500 a year ago since the same set is about ~$880 now.

The $200 16gb set of ram cost more than i initially purchased it

feels good man

How does increasing ASPs increase the barrier for entry? High margin means companies can lower prices to squeeze competitors, thus LOWERING prices increases barriers to entry.

As I posted above, the companies are all not building out new capacity, but it's not a conspiracy - there's no governing body like with OPEC, it's common business sense.

Tendforce has also been reporting this past week that Samsung and SK Hynix are going to build new capacity after both explicitly stated they were not doing that, so I don't know what their agenda is.

Jane, you ignorant slut; educate yourself before you opine on a topic. Each company is producing more and more bits every month. We're looking at 38% bit growth for 2018 - you think that warrants legal action? It's just that the increase in demand is outpacing bit growth, and you can thank autonomous driving, AI, and people buying new phones every 1-2 years for that (not to mention game consoles and GPU's with more and more memory).

Retail is a relatively small market; big purchases by companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. eat up all the supply.

Also, no one is stopping you from starting your own memory company and fabbing chips - get going, slick.

>In the recent years, the Chinese government has tried to build up domestic DRAM and NAND Flash industries. The period of depressed prices before 2016 was a window of opportunity for Chinese semiconductor companies to acquire international memory manufacturers. The U.S.-based Micron in particular was a sought-after acquisition target as South Korean manufacturers Samsung and SK Hynix continued to remain profitable despite the market downturn and were less inclined to work with the Chinese. With the market making a strong recovery in the second half of 2016, Micron has regained its financial footings by following the South Korean DRAM suppliers in raising prices. Hence chances of Micron developing deep relationships with Chinese semiconductor companies are less likely.

It would take a decade or more for a Chinese competitor to go from starting from scratch to shipping even one product, at an incredible cost taking into account not only setting up labs, but hiring qualified personnel and the mammoth task of R&D in an incredibly complex field as well. And all the while the current cartel are raking in their grossly inflated profits, accumulating more and more money with which to develop better new products, raising the bar to entry even further in the meantime.

Your analysis would make sense if it was an industry that was easy to break into, rather than one of the very hardest. Any Chinese clowns can buy some GPUs from AMD or Nvidia and slap them on a circuit board with a hunk of metal on top, which is why there are so many graphics card vendors. Developing DRAM products from scratch isn't so simple, which is WHY there's a tiny cartel of three companies controlling the entire market.

im happy i got my 16gb for $100 the other week. ddr3 though but still

Well, yes, from an acquisition stand point, very low prices are huge. Micron just bought Inotera a year ago and Elpida 3-4 years ago. This is why only 3 DRAM companies make 95% of the DRAM now.

China offered $22/share for Micron when it was ~$13 or so, which Micron rejected presumably on grounds that the US government would never approve. Micron is now at $43.71/share.

Analysts have been fomenting fear regarding China entering the memory market due to their large capex but everyone in the know says even if they start producing usable quantities, they will be 2-3 generations/nodes behind and would not be profitable. China just admitted a week ago that they think they could achieve 10% yield (lol) on a node equivalent of like 22nm in 2019 or 2020. Good luck, China (without stealing IP, anyway, which a few ex-Micron employees were recently busted for moving over to Chinese companies).

fucking normalfags

They won't stop though