"Pentium-blews, I know you are an amdroid, so I am going to type slowly and carefully. See if you can follow this.
Read the article again. Note what they are saying about SDRAM pricing right now--it's below cost. It's well below cost. It's subterranian. Waaay to much supply, not enough demand. A year ago, everybody cranked up the fabs and built a bunch of PC133 for a continuing boom in PC sales than never happened. By the end of the last quarter, Micron (and the rest) had been dumping dram for 2 quarters, and still had 2 quarters of production in inventory. Micron lost $500 million in six months. Net assets went from $2.5 billion to $2.0 billion between August and March. Eight more quarters of that and there is no more Micron.
Hyundai is $8 billion in debt and hemmoraging $200 million every quarter.
Nanya lost $50 million last quarter making DDR, which was selling for 3-4 times as much as SDRAM. Care to guess what they lost on SDRAM production.
infineon lost $200 million just on DRAM operations in the past quarter.
These guys were COUNTING on DDR-SDRAM margins to generate profits this year, and instead DDr-SDRAM prices are falling to parity with PC133, which has HIT A NEW LOW IN THE SPOT MARKET EVERY DAY FOR THE PAST TWO WEEKS. Breakeven point for the industry on PC133 is about $4.25. It's about to go through $3.00 per 128Mb chip. do the math--they are losing money on every chip. They could stop making DRAM today and there is enough sloshing around in inventory to last for another quarter, minimum, and maybe well into 2002 if the PC market and the telecom market don't turn around as expected.
Why is DDR-SDRAM falling to parity with PC133? Because there is no demand for it. They can't turn it around easily and use it for video card memory--the organization is wrong, and the speeds are too low. Is it because Micron and Infineon, and Hyundai are great big ol' charities that want to make DDR "affordable" for Pentium_Blew and his buddies? Hell no! It's falling to parity because it is competing as an equivalent commodity with PC133.
Get it?
In terms of performance, DDR-SDRAM = PC133 +10%
So in terms of pricing, at best, DDR-SDRAM = (losing a shitload on every chip) + 10% = losing 90% of a shitload.
DDR doesn't compete with RDRAM. If you want an Athlon PC, it doesn't matter how much you might love RDRAM; there is no such a thing as an RDRAM chipset for the Athlon.
If you want a Pentium-4, same thing. You are buying RDRAM. you have no choice.
If you want an Athlon and don't want the flakyness and memory limitations of DDR, you can buy PC133 and get most of the bang with none of the bugs.
Overall Athlon sales are ahead of Pentium-4, probably in the neighboorhood of 2:1. But Pentium-4+RDRAM are selling at least 2:1 over Athlon+DDR (because the overwhelming majority of Athlon/Duron PCs sold are using SDRAM.
Try to find one DDR PC at any retail outlet.
If you are rooting for DDR-SDRAM to succeed at main system memory, you should not cheer DDR-SDRAM price decreases. It's going from being a marginally profitalbe commodity to a commodity that is losing $ on every sale. Generally, products with that pricing history aren't around very long."" From a yahoo<g> |
