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Technology Stocks : Veeco Instruments-Who? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (1628)	11/8/1998 4:39:00 PM
From: Carl R.	Respond to of 3069

One major difference between the two industries is that usually you decide on how many drives you need first, then on capacity. Virtually all desktop computers contain one and only one disc drive. Many servers have RAID arrays where the type of RAID determines the number of drives. While bit density is constantly increasing, the number of drives is not decreasing. Contrast that to DRAM where a computer is built with however many DRAM chips it takes to reach the desired memory size. As DRAM makers increase the density of chips they end up with more and more chips, as well as more and more bits. Thus as a given fab keeps increasing output by doing shrinks, and increasing bit output by shifting generations, that fab can supply more and more computers. Another large difference is that as more and more knowledge becomes available online, storage needs are constantly growing. However software's ability to use ever larger blocks of DRAM is not growing as fast. I think WIN98 can usefully use more DRAM than WIN95, but in three years the change is not that dramatic. If you bought a computer a couple years ago you would have gotten a 540MB disc and 16mb of DRAM. Today you might get a 5G drive, but you would probably only get 64MB of DRAM. The 16MB a couple years ago would have been made out of 4MBit chips, requiring 32 chips. Todays computer would have 8 64MBit chips in it, and next year it might have 2 256mbit chips in it. So previously you needed 1 disk drive and 32 DRAM chips, while today you need 1 disk and 8 DRAM chips. This I think makes it clear why so many DRAM fabs need to be closed to get supply back in line with demand, while the same is not true of drives. Carl