Hi Jdaasoc; Re prices of registered DDR and RDRAM...
Micron is only selling registered DDR up to size 256MB so far, at least at Crucial:
crucial.com
Now Micron is largely responsible for forcing the rest of the industry to quit ripping off users of DDR. That they intended on doing this has been known since early this year (see ebnews.com for example), but Micron's ability to do this only applies to those modules that they sell. So one would expect the 512MB and 1GB DDR modules to crash in price when Micron starts putting them out on Crucial. At that time, the registered prices you're looking at will likely fall far below RDRAM pricing.
The other thing to note is that Crucial's registered DDR prices differ from their unbuffered DDR prices by less than $5 per module, and that this premium is about the same for all three of the registered modules they sell. The reason this is important is that it indicates that the difference in cost for registered and unbuffered DDR DIMMs doesn't scale with size. That is, to turn an unbuffered BOM (Bill Of Material) into a registered BOM, all you have to add is a PLL chip, and the buffer registers. Unbuffered DDR already includes a Serial Presence Detect chip. As you add more DDR chips, you don't have to add extra "popcorn". This means that if registered DDR is produced in sufficient volume, it's price will be very very close to the price of unbuffered DDR. If you want an actual parts list for the popcorn of a registered DDR DIMM, look on page 5 of the following link, which is for both the 256MB and 512MB registered DDR DIMMs from Micron, and notice that the popcorn chips are identical (namely, one PLL, two registers, and one SPD):
images.micron.com
As of yet, the market for registered DDR is in its infancy compared to that of RDRAM. Since DDR is almost as easy to make as SDRAM, I would be willing to bet that the premium for registered DDR over unbuffered DDR (per MB) is within 10% of the equivalent premium for registered SDRAM over unbuffered SDRAM, at least by the time that registered DDR becomes common. The only problem with my making such a price series is that I don't have any good prices for registered DDR SDRAM.
To get the 5 cheapest registered DDR 256MB module prices, I would have to look through many pages of mostly unbuffered DDR SKUs, and try to pick out the links that say "registered" and avoid the ones that say "non registered" or "unbuffered". This would be too time consuming for me. You must realize that the price updating I do is exquisitely boring, but has the advantage that it requires only about 30 seconds to put together each day. To put together a similar price series for registered would increase my time to more like 5 minutes. Five or ten minutes isn't very long, but imagine spending that much time for a year. I don't mind surfing new territory, but looking at prices is dull, dull, dull. No way am I going to do hunt through SKUs for rare registered parts, forget about asking me to do so. You do it if you want the data, my eyes are too old and my patience too short. In addition, I believe that the sequence I have will converge to the same result, so why should I go to the trouble. But if you want to make the effort, I'll be cheering for you! Maybe you have a source of pricing that doesn't require you to look through pages of SKUs, I don't.
-- Carl
P.S. Does BJ's have anything to do with the poster on Yahoo titled "gimme_a_bj"? |
