>16M will be obselete by end of next year.
Frankly, I think this memory craze has gotten a bit demented. If I could buy a gigabyte of RAM for my home PC for $25, I still wouldn't bother. I have 16 Megs now, and all my applications run just fine, including my SCO X-window server, dial-up PPP, Netscape, about 6 X-windows and telnet windows, and my ftp client; and sometimes I run my financial package on top of that plus play a music CD. This idea that the world is beating a path to the 256 M SIMM is hilarious to me. And I'm a computer professional! I can see a few instances where I work (all R&D) where I'd want more memory, like my NT box and my Solaris box in my office, but at most, doubling my memory, not x16! (In ten years, yes, but 2-4 years, what for???).
Remember the commodity debate that raged here a few months back? Doesn't the RAM market now resemble the oil (i.e. OPEC) struggle; coffee bean struggle, etc.? With oversupply, the price just plummets, and people go out of business. With the higher capacity DRAMs hitting the market, it seems inevitable. With OPEC, they all know that reducing supply will keep up prices; however, they all want the cash so badly that they cannot resist selling extra and over producing, so that all end up with less. With Samsung cutting back, there will be plenty of capacity from other companies rushing in to fill up the void and reduce their own investment losses.
For the consumer, it's payback time for the artificially high price after the Sumomito resin factory fire. You had to figure that a bulge in capacity would occur when, for a while, producing DRAMs was like minting currency. No doubt the market will stablize, but it might take another 6-12 months before capacity pares down. |
