X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 7)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

Memory

It’s a nice tickling feeling to see your forecasts coming true. I was repeating the first half of this year that there would be none of the back-to-school season, and the second half – that the market wouldn’t bloom up before Christmas. In theory, we should have witnessed the peak of the Christmas sales, but there was none. Moreover, I again disagree with Dataquest that promises a memory deficit for 2004-2005. There’ll be none of that as there is no demand for memory because there are no offers to stimulate the demand.

Well, Intel may find something at last (they are looking for ways to boost the demand for their processors, but that’s quite close). Or Microsoft may make a miracle of releasing the Longhorn (which is too raw so far) in 2004 rather than 2006. If there’re no such things, why there should be any deficit? Added a number of 300mm fabs to start production of memory chips in 2004-2005. There’s only one variant feasible: half of the manufactures get fed of all this and switch to flash, which is becoming ever more demanded product.

Overall, there have been no glimpses of sunlight in this market for long. As usual, the price of a 256Mb DDR400 chip went down resolutely from $4.7 to $4. There’s only one piece of good news for the manufacturers: the main demand seems to be shifting to DDR400. Well, it should be as the i865 has been here for quite a while already.

It was also as usual with SDRAM: the price was growing up, but slowed down to a halt in the end of the month. That’s all right. This is a normal behavior of a demanded memory type before a Christmas Eve. All involved made their shopping in November to be able to offer finished products before Christmas. This is mostly consumer electronics, which, unlike DDR SDRAM, enjoys a stable demand.

On the second thought, I may be a bit wrong about Dataquest. There is one and only variant (if we exclude wars, floods, earthquakes in Taiwan and other acts of God) when computer memory may become a deficit in 2004-2005. This may happen if the packaging and testing firms don’t cope with the amounts the manufacturers and the customers would like to deal with. The transition to the 0.15-micron tech process and 300mm wafers has outlined the problem. What will there be after they have all of their 300mm fabs working at full capacity and build new ones? The next year the manufacturers will shift to DDR-II and this process requires the testers and packagers of the new memory to reequip their facilities. This may become a real problem.