Hi Jdaasoc; Re the high price of DDR memory. This is not a surprise to me, here I am explicitly predicting exactly this situation for initial DDR prices back in September (and I could probably find much earlier references if I looked harder, predicting that new technology is going to inititally be more expensive doesn't require rocket science.):
Bilow, Sep 26, 2000
The prices charged by Crucial for those DDR sticks has nothing to do with spot, production or anything at all. Since they are selling into a restricted market, the prices don't mean anything at all, in my opinion. I think they deliberately set them relatively low in order to convince engineers that DDR would soon be very cheap.
This is situation normal with new memory types. The memory makers are going to sell things for what the market will bear. But when they are talking to design engineers, they are all sweetness and light: "We plan on reducing prices blah blah blah blah." All they are doing is trying to convince engineers to use their high margin products. But engineers know this, and take it into account. Maybe they do it cause it might fool a manager somewhere. I can just see the engineer convincing management to go with DDR because Micron is already "selling" it at a 10% premium (or whatever) to SDRAM. (LOL!) Of course Micron is going to sell the first sticks at a high price.
None of this really matters to a design engineer making a decision today. Even the motherboard guys know that their motherboards are not going to hit the big volume until mid to late next year. What matters is the pricing at the time that volume is required, and with DDR we are all pretty sure that it will be reasonable. Sure the early stuff will be expensive, but humans love new stuff, and will pay extra for it. #reply-14461395
Re: "Registered DDR which is the type Intel believes that will actually work in PC servers in 2002 has a price of $385." Here is Tenchusatsu on Intel's opinions about DDR:
So to generalize the way Intel sees it, DDR is great for systems with ultra-high capacities of memory, while RDRAM is great for smaller-scale desktop systems and workstations. #reply-12892422
Given that they are going into "ultra-high capacity" systems, shouldn't you be looking at the pricing for 256MB and larger registered DIMMs? Hey, if you'd like to make such a series, please do. In fact, point me out the numbers, and I'll add them in, but lets do it for reasonably sized modules, not the dinky ones that would be unlikely to be used in a server. But by comparison, remember how expensive RDRAM was when it first came out.
-- Carl
P.S. Re: "I hope you are long the market on something because I don't think Greenspan will disappoint Bush on his honeymoon today." Ouch! |
