Hi Steve Lee; Re supply, demand, and the high price of RIMMs...
I agree completely that the high price of RIMMs is mostly due to supply and demand issues, and more importantly, the small number of suppliers. If there were a lot of demand for RDRAM, then there would be a lot more suppliers producing it, and the price would come down. What percentage of current memory production is RDRAM, anyway, 3 to 5%?
But what I wrote back in September still applies completely:
The economic reason for there being a difference includes at least the following:
(1) RDRAM is more expensive to manufacture than SDRAM. In addition, RIMMs are considerably more expensive than DIMMs. Consequently, the premium on RDRAM is not as juicy a target as it appears.
(2) Real RDRAM pricing is far below the prices reported in smsperling. (And SDRAM pricing is somewhat below the pricing he reports.) Rambus longs have stated for months that Dell buys RDRAM at a price considerably below the spot price, and this is undoubtedly correct. If the memory makers did start producing for the spot market, they would quickly drive spot market prices to around 75% over PC133 SDRAM prices, I would guess, and I've been expecting RIMM prices to drop to something like this for months. #reply-14451731
Heck, I've repeatedly stated on this thread that I expect the RIMM premium to eventually stabilize at 50 to 100% above SDRAM levels. That it is still way, way, way above those is something that I find surprising. On the other hand, the price of RDRAM is never going to stabilize at a price lower than that of the standard mainstream memory (now SDRAM, soon to be DDR SDRAM, after that, DDR-II) because RDRAM will always be a niche player.
-- Carl |
