Hi Don Green; A note on Samsung pricing for RDRAM...
Do you suppose it is really the case that Samsung is getting 2.5x pricing for RDRAM as opposed to SDRAM? This would seem like rather bad news for RDRAM to me. But perhaps we should believe it, Samsung has been quite insistent about this:
Intel loosens timing spec to spur Rambus usage April 24, 2000
But one RDRAM vendor, Samsung, denied that prices are artificially inflated, and said there is no great difference between the RDRAM selling price and its cost of production. "I've heard that 20 percent figure from Intel about 10 times," said Jay Hoon Chung, manager of DRAM marketing for Samsung Electronics Co. (Seoul, South Korea), currently the largest supplier of RDRAMs. "But 20 percent is not probable by our point of view. We expect the price gap will be 1.5x by the fourth quarter."
techweb.com
Basically, the memory industry has been all but promising memory designers that if they spec in RDRAM, they are going to have to pay a price premium for the next year. That is in addition to the availability concerns. DDR, by contrast is available as a minor modification to SDRAM in the final weeks of processing.
-- Carl
P.S. Did I forget to mention that Samsung's 50% increase in RDRAM production (as opposed to the 400% increase talked about back a few months ago) will take at least 10 weeks to make real parts? For that reason, it is going to miss a good bit of the DDR season this summer. The price comparisons are not going to be pretty... |
