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Technology Stocks : ATI Technologies in 1997 (T.ATY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SBHX who wrote (3833)	7/30/1999 1:58:00 AM
From: Sleeperz	Respond to of 5927

I guess you hav not noticed but Memory prices have gone UP. Check out Microns stock price, it has gone up too. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Micron Technology Inc. (NYSE:MU - news), the biggest U.S. maker of computer memory chips, expects memory chip prices to rise slightly starting next month due to an acceleration of demand and lower inventory levels, a Micron executive said Wednesday. Micron's vice president of corporate affairs, Kipp Bedard, told a BancBoston Robertson Stephens semiconductor conference that memory chip prices climbed during July and have been gradually moving up from a price range of $4.50 to $4.75 for a 64-megabit chip. He said he expected prices to rise to about $5.00 to $5.25 starting around Aug. 1. dailynews.yahoo.com Based on current drop in memory prices (has anyone checked DIMM prices lately?), the costs could be very low : the SDRAM is the same chips as that used for DIMMs I'm guessing they are < 50c/MB in huge quantities. But, other than people who are very tighly connected with purchasing of raw materials to make boards like these, few people actually know the actual costs. But I'll try to make guesses. Assuming the package, box, manuals and cdrom are about $4.00, Here's a table of possible cost compared to asic costs: ASIC \| Total $5 \| 25.00 $10 \| 30.00 $11 \| 31.00 $12 \| 32.00 $15 \| 35.00 --- I doubt if these graphics chips cost anywhere near $15 unless there is serious yield problems.

To: SBHX who wrote (3833)	7/30/1999 9:14:00 PM
From: Synapsid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5927

I think there is quite bit of variation in the memory cost associated with each add-in board architecture. For example, if a graphics chip operates with a 64-bit memory bus it can use commodity (DIMM-type) 4Mx16 SDRAM (64 Mbit, 8 MByte a piece) with a 32MB framebuffer. However, with a true 128-bit memory datapath, such as used by most Rage 128's, 2Mx32 SDRAMs are required for a 32 MB configuration which are likely to be priced higher. Moreover, for a 16MB configuration, the required 1Mx64 SDRAMs do not exist forcing the use of four times as many chips (4 Mbit, 2 MByte each), resulting in a significant cost disadvantage for a 128-bit vs. a 64-bit architecture. TDFX's solution in its new 16MB Velocity business board (128-bit memory) is to use SGRAMs to reduce the number of memory chips required (probably not ideal). I think this is one of reasons for ATI pushing 32MB so strongly -- memory cost is much more competitive at 32MB compared to 16MB, since ATI cannot afford the performance hit of a 64-bit memory bus. Interestingly, NVIDIA does have a downgraded TNT2 product called "Model 64" (similar to Vanta) with a 64-bit bus which is targeted at add-in cards, reducing memory cost by allowing the use of 64 Mbit SDRAMs. Of course, at the cutting edge of memory clock speeds (say, 160 MHz+) commodity-type memory parts are not usable, although ATI's memory clock speeds are probably still low enough to use commodity chips across the board.