System News
Mark Williams RAMs home the idea that DDR prices will be falling, soon.
The price of DRAM was at record highs through 2018, making it tough – especially at the beginning of that year – to recommend higher system memory capacities in some situations. You know it’s rough when the recommended amount of RAM you desire costs more than what many high-end consumer CPUs go for!
DRAM prices peaked earlier last year when Samsung and Micron both reported that the migration to their new 18nm and 17nm production nodes respectively were facing teething problems with respect to sampling and yields. With the PC market booming, SK Hynix, the only other major memory manufacturer (95% market share between all three), while not transitioning to a smaller node, wasn’t able to pick up the huge amount of slack left by Samsung and Micron causing a memory shortage in the market. Once the manufacturing issues were resolved just before mid-year memory prices started to fall once again.
Underlying all of thgat were fresh allegations of price fixing made by Wu Zhenguo, head of China’s antimonopoly bureau under the State Administration for Market Regulation who said, “The anti-monopoly investigation into these three companies has made important progress… [it] has yielded massive evidence”.
Quite what that evidence is remains unclear, as nothing further has been
revealed from the investigation at the time of writing; however, this isn’t the first time these companies have been caught price-fixing. It has happened twice before, in 2005 by the US Justice department and again in 2010 by the EU Commission. If this is found to be the case again, there’s no doubt that it would help explain why DRAM prices have remained largely flat (ignoring the supply shortage spike) for well over a year.
RAMeXchange, which is known to be a reliable source for DRAM price change news, has stated that it expects to see an around 10% decrease in DRAM production contract prices by the end of 2018 and a greater than 10% reduction in prices by the end of Q1 2019. This is in part due to some contracts being revised downwards twice in November, something that very rarely happens, showing a pessimistic outlook for the market.
With supply finally starting to outstrip demand thanks to increased yields of the new manufacturing node processes at Samsung and Micron and DRAM contracts currently now being made on short term monthly cycles, there’s every chance that DRAM prices will come down quite substantially over the first half of 2019. Especially for 32GB kits, which manufacturers have begun offering attractive prices on to drive sales.
As John from TI Computers also points out, Intel’s ongoing issues with moving to 10nm, causing a 14nm production backlog and thus an Intel CPU shortage, will “thus reduce the demand for PCs and by extension, DRAM”, further easing price pressures.
So, if you’re thinking of upgrading your system’s RAM or purchasing a new PC, perhaps wait until the end of Q1 or mid-2019 to allow these new contract prices to flow through the supply chain. With any luck you could find some decent savings to put towards other things.