MEMORY LANE -- RDRAM prices drop, making Pentium 4s a hot ticket in small, midsize businesses.
(Industry Trend or Event)
Computer Reseller News, April 16, 2001 p3
By Moltzen, Edward F.
Full Text
New York - The prices for RDRAM are dropping fast, paving the way for a marked increase of Intel's Pentium 4 systems into the small- and
midsize-business market.
"Falling memory prices are having a huge impact in making Pentium 4 the preferred system for small and medium business," says JoAnn Evans, vice
president of Net\Works, a $1.4 million solution provider.
Net\Works, Minneapolis, is dropping its Pentium III white-box line and moving completely to Pentium 4 systems as of June 1 in the wake of the
memory price cuts, she says.
"I can't believe how fast memory prices are falling," says Evans. "It's dropping $2 or $3 a day. And memory is one of the most expensive parts of the
system."
Evans predicts that Intel will release in the next several weeks a Pentium 4 1.5GHz processor with 256 Mbytes of RAM, up from the current 128
Mbytes.
Late last year, as Pentium 4 systems began shipping, RDRAM modules were listed at $180, but prices have dropped to as low as $100. By
summer's end, they could reach $80, one executive says.
"People were thinking [RDRAM] was going to be much more expensive than DDR [double data rate memory]," says Wai Szeto, vice president of
product marketing at Kingston Technology, Fountain Valley, Calif.
"As Intel continues to push Pentium 4, the volume of [RDRAM] is picking up. Within two to three months, the price difference between [RDRAM] and
DDR will probably be less than 5 percent." At that rate, he says, 1.7GHz Pentium 4 PCs could sell for $1,100 by summer's end. Prices now average
$1,800.
How the memory pricing shakes out could have strong implications. Most major PC makers said earlier this year they were not leading with Pentium
4 solutions into accounts partly because of the high cost of RDRAM.
"Despite the seeming advantage that DDR has over [RDRAM], Samsung . . . has gone public with its belief that [RDRAM] will be the dominant
technology," says Grant Johnson, manager of the Knowledge Marketplace Group at Converge, an online marketplace that tracks component pricing
trends.
"It is clear that Samsung would not take such a stance without good reason. Perhaps they are much closer to offering a low-cost [RDRAM] solution
than we realize."
Copyright [copyright] 2001 CMP Media LLC
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