Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Do RAM Prices CHANGE So Much?”.
If you’ve ever suddenly needed to buy a computer memory or an SSD, there’s a good chance, you’ve experienced either sticker shock or a pleasant surprise. When you looked up how much it cost, indeed, both RAM and the NAND flash that holds the data inside SSDs are notorious for fluctuating in price, more than other components. But why to answer we spoke with our friends at g.skill and we’d like to thank them for contributing their insight as it turns out. The main reason is that both RAM and NAND flash are commodity goods and when we say commodity we mean a good that can be used in many different types of markets. Think about corn, for example.
You can eat it sure, but it can also be used for everything from it. Animal feeds have biofuel, so large amounts of it are regularly sold to many different types of businesses. The DRAM and NAND markets work in much the same way. Nearly all modern electronic devices.
Everything from TVs to smartwatches, heck, even Internet, connected microwaves need both RAM and flash storage. Not just computers by comparison, something like an x86 CPU from Intel or AMD, is really only being sold to two kinds of markets system integrators like Dell or HP and retailers like Newegg and micro Center. You also have the fact that dieren and NAND can be shipped off more or less unchanged to these different customers, for example, the RAM that’s inside your computer is not all that dissimilar from the RAM inside your phone. So if a ram manufacturer is trying to increase supply to serve a bunch of different use cases, all they really have to do is shrink the process note.
So they can fit more RAM chips on one wafer. Then they cut it up like a square cut pizza and send. However, many chips to buyers serving each of these different segments. Contrast that with something like manufacturing displays, where different resolutions and panel types mean that serving many different markets is much more challenging for any single consolidated manufacturer. So this ends up, meaning that more external forces are exerting influence on how much DRAM and NAND will cost you and also means that manufacturers have a much harder time estimating how much supply they need to keep on hand. That means that both supply, glutes and shortages are more likely. Sorta gist, can and have been caused by many different things. For example, there can be unforeseen high demand when a hot new phone comes out, that everyone wants, or even a service that causes a spike in demand.
On the server side of things, I mean think how much more memory Google might suddenly require if they’re stadia game streaming service were to take off good luck with that other times, supply can be strained by production problems such as power outages that disable the system’s use To maintain their dust, free environments on the production line, meaning that manufacturers have to scrap whatever’s on the line and start from scratch now this might only set things back a week or two and have a minimal impact on prices, but other times natural disasters like earthquakes And fires have shut down fabs for months at a time resulting in significant shortages in supply, something that notably happened to SK Hynix back in 2013. There’S also the possibility of politics muddying things up as they so often do. For example, there was a trade dispute between Japan and Korea in 2019. Japan supplies lots of raw materials used in the manufacture of D ramen and meaning that the fabs in Korea couldn’t get the ingredients they needed for a short while now that situation was fortunately resolved quickly, but any kind of more protracted conflict could have driven prices up.
In a big way, of course, sometimes mishaps end up working in the consumers favor. Instead, in the mid 2000s, there was a huge surge of people buying mobile devices, like phones and the RAM manufacturers assumed that this trend would just keep going the way that it was so they started churning out lots more RAM, but instead the market got saturated. Suddenly everybody already had a phone or two and sales slowed down, so suddenly there was a lot of excess supply, meaning that folks, who bought Ram during this time ended up getting a bargain. There have even been times that memory price have been pushed below the manufacturing cost for the DRAM chips, because it’s worse for the manufacturers to shut down the fabs than to keep pumping out chips at a loss like during the Great Pringles incident of 1994, which actually Wasn’T a real thing: it was never a Pringles incident that I know of, but you know what there was this segue to. Our sponsor. Brilliant brilliant mission is to help people achieve their learning goals, so, whether you’re a student, a professional, brushing up or learning a cutting-edge topic or someone who just wants to understand the world better, you should check out brilliant.
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