What's wrong with the RAM industry?

Hi,

I was browsing an online computer parts retailer and something started bothering me. It seems most consumer technology is progressing as I would expect. CPUs are getting faster and better, hard drives are doubling almost every year, graphics cards are getting much more powerful. Display devices and batteries stagnate as usual due to the complexity of the technology involved. Same as it was five years ago, except for one small little detail. System RAM seems to be both technologically and economically stagnating.

Now, I can’t really find any statistics to back this up, but I remember upgrading my PC about three years ago (couldn’t give you an exact date) and I bought a $120 graphics card (a Geforce Ti4200 128MB), a $120 hard drive (80GB), $80 CPU (~ 1.4Ghz AMD), 1GB (2x 512MB) of DDR 333 RAM for $90 + s/h. A modest upgrade, middle of the line.

Right now for the same money I can get a graphics card that is an order of magnitude faster, a 400GB hard drive, a CPU at least twice if not three times as fast, and… 1GB of DDR2 667 RAM. Sure, the RAM has doubled in speed, but that is not in line with how the RAM market behaved before.

Now, I work in the IC industry, I’m an embedded software engineer, I can come up with a few theories of my own, but none of them are satisfactory.

a) It’s the market. PC makers and people are not interested in larger amounts of RAM vs. the speed because of the perception that it is not needed. Well I need it - at work I use pretty much 1GB of physical ram and still sometimes spill over into the page file. At home I feel entirely limited by my 1GB system. Of course I’m a power user, but I feel I could easily make good use of 16GB of ram were it available. High resolution video is here, and even when editing home movies there’s really no amount of RAM that is ever enough or too much. I can’t even find 2GB sticks for less than $500.

b) It’s a temporary plateau due to the 32-bit -> 64-bit transition. IA32 PCs can’t address more than 4GB of virtual memory in the purest sense and the way operating systems have classically been built in the past there was a limitation to 2GB of physical memory (due to address space partitioning). As far as I can tell latest version of Linux and Windows addressed this issue (no pun intended) and can handle 4GB in the least case and more with Physical Address Extension, up to 64GB in fact. Is this still an issue?

c) There is a transistor density problem that I am not aware of. Making faster RAM perhaps turned out to be a path of much less resistance than making larger/denser RAM. DRAM uses a few transistors per bit and there is a lot of bits in 2GB of RAM. Getting past this point might be creating some sort of a design issue with crosstalk on rows, or something like that. Yet, from the point of view from inside the IC industry (we don’t make general purpose RAM though) it still seems that DRAM is just a very very expensive part of consumer electronics as compared to other chips. Sure, other chips have orders of magnitude less silicon but they’re also insanely more complicated overall - feels like it would balance out.

d) RAMBUS! I don’t really know/remember the details but any time I complained about anything RAM related about 4 years ago all my friends from the IT industry would reply with “Blame Rambus”. Are they hoarding patents or something?

e) I’m wrong and I simply got an insanely good deal on RAM three years ago and it has been increasing in capacity/speed at the expected rates.

So what do you think? Which one or which combinations of what?

Nah, you’re not wrong. Why, just yesterday I was browsing computers and I was stunned to see that they all come standard with just 512MB of memory. That’s simply not adequate anymore. That’s what you needed three years ago. I was staggered that things have progressed so little in RAM.

I reject the premise until you’ve done a little more homework. Check out Sharky Extreme’s RAM pricing guides – you can actually read their old ones, too – and get a historical look at how prices have been growing and shrinking. I know it seems like a lot of work, but with an Excel spreadsheet and about 20 minutes of clicking, you can get yourself a graph of RAM prices over the last three years. If you set up multiple columns, you can also track prices for several types of RAM, sorted by performance.

Here’s a link to the latest RAM guide: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/guides/WMPG/article.php/10706_3639531__2

I used these guides to compile a two-year history of CPU prices, including highs and lows relative to release price, and then checked CPU prices twice a week on my favorite vendor’s site. The result? I bought a CPU at 26% of its release price, and it’s back up to 30% now. So, with a little sleuthing, you can figure out if your historical data support your premise. Now for my totally amateur opinion.

The demand for fast RAM is driving the current DDR2 craze, but AMD’s on-chip memory controller with DDR had better latency than DDR2 for a long time, and DDR2 at super-high speeds remains an enthusiast part with very little marginal benefit. The demand for big RAM is pretty much topped out at 4GB because nothing can really make use of more than that. I haven’t seen more than 1GB on a stick yet, for example, but you could in theory put 4x1GB sticks in a system today. Doing that to get a little more performance out of your system might not be the best approach, though, because RAM hasn’t been the bottleneck to system performance in a while now. DDR-333 RAM is quite fast, and you might notice a mild difference in high-end applications or games by switching to faster-clocked RAM. But your best bet to boost overall performance is to keep adding large modules of “slow” RAM to your old system. Even better would be to get a motherboard that supports SATA, and put your swap file on a SATA RAM disk, loaded up with your cheap old DDR-333 memory. My system uses PC2100 (266 MHz DDR) and runs games just as well as my wife’s system with PC3200 (400 MHz DDR) because I have a better graphics card than she does.

Ram prices are incredibly volatile depending on various demand and supply issues and it looks like they’ve been going up all year. ramseeker has a historical graph and some of the more popular modules have more than doubled in price. I haven’t been keeping a close enough watch on the market to figure out why that is.

Well, RAM is not a bottleneck if you don’t use it all. Try applying an image correction to a one hour long 30 fps high resolution vacation video you made and see how that scales with RAM size. Of course the key thing is CPU, but then RAM size.

I work in the electronic component distribution industry. Memory is very volatile. Some of the manufacturers are telling us that costs will be issued when the parts ship to us. They won’t even promise to hold a cost steady for 30 days. I’ve seen reports from the last couple of months where DRAM costs were going up by over a percent a week.

There are also shortages going on. Lead times are expanding and I think some orders are being rejected, due to no product being available.

It’s not the first time.

In the early 90’s RAM prices stayed stuck for years. To buy 16 MB you could say byebye to nearly a grand. To outfit a computer with the 128 MB that your computer could handle, you’d end up paying a zillion times more on RAM than you’d spent on the computer plus all the peripherals rolled into one.

Back then it was attributed to some chip fabrication plant burning down in Asia.

Now I think it’s lack of demand. Not many PCs with 40 gigs of RAM being sold = RAM manufacturers aren’t dropping price per gig.

From what I’ve read, it’s a horrible business from the manufacturer’s point of view. It’s a commodity product with insane capital requirements. You can easily lose billions of dollars if the market is glutted. Few companies are willing to take that risk.

That’s the one. I rember the big price crash back in 2000 or so. It always used to be that memory cost £30-£40 per megabyte, and then it fell to £4-5 per Mb. Not good for those all poor saps that had just opened brand-new multi-billion-dollar fabs.

I’m not sure about the technological restrictions, but it looks like there are at least some allegations of price fixing (biz.yahoo.com) across the industry.

Innocent until proven guilty, grasping at straws of conspiracy and all that, but it is a convenient answer (or, at the very least, a convenient contributing factor).

It would be interesting to see a graph of flash RAM vs. regular RAM capacity over time.

At this moment, a 1 GB SD card is $38, while 1 GB of DDR2 is more like $120. A few years ago, I was buying 8 MB cards for $30.