X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

Memory

It was a crazy month in this market as concerns its main topic – memory prices. The March growth transformed into an ordinary exchange agitation, with prices flying high only to fall down soon. Something like that happened in April. At first, the price jumped from $5.6 for a 256Mb DDR400 chip to $6.66 in the middle of the month and then immediately rushed down, to $5.35 at the start of May. This wide amplitude was an opportunity for some players to earn some money, including memory makers themselves.

Now the situation should be returning into the groove as even those manufacturers that had technological problems are solving them now. I mean the Nanya-Infineon alliance in the first hand, as their troubles with installation of 0.11-micron equipment may have contributed to the recent crisis. They planned earlier to put their joint venture Inotera into operation in Q1, but now this fab will only sample first wafers in this month and will have only started its normal operation by the end of the year. Nanya’s upgrade of its own two 200mm fabs to the 0.11-micron tech process is also going on with delays. As a result, Nanya is simply incapable of meeting the demand from its major OEM clients. Anyway, the company is going to produce up to 80% of all its DRAM chips with the 0.11-micron process in the end of 2004 (against today’s 10%!).

Infineon, on the contrary, said it would reduce DRAM production in two, from 50 to 27 million chips, switching to other memory types. This announcement also contributed to the price growth. But after the growth peak was over and the prices plunged lower than they had been at the beginning of the month, the company imperturbably reported good quarter results, saying that it had no problems with the 0.11-micron process whatsoever, that it wouldn’t reduce DDR production in May in spite of rumors and, moreover, that it would finish building its 300mm fab in the USA.

Micron seems to suffer most from transitioning to the new tech process – the company was surely the worst of all in the first quarter. Like Nanya, it found itself unable to satiate its clients who started moving their orders to Micron’s competitors.

Only the Koreans help keep the prices low. Samsung has successfully switched to 0.10 micron, solving the problems with the dielectric and increasing the chip yield to an acceptable level. Hynix finished the first quarter with a profit of $253 million and said it would change its policy from May, paying more attention to the spot market. It means that the prices there will continue falling down, if nothing extraordinary happens.

Now that we have surveyed the market situation, let’s move on to end products, to memory modules. DDR2 is being announced as if the manufacturers didn’t care a bit about where we might use them (well, that’s really not their problem). Anyway, Crucial, TwinMOS and Adtec all joined the DDR2 camp in April. Interestingly, many companies are offering PC2-5300 modules on DDR667 chips, not yet ratified officially by JEDEC.

Veterans are securing their positions in the market: 512MB modules from Samsung (PC2-3200, $330) and Micron (PC2-4300, $420) were spotted in the Japan retail net. They also announced one-tier registered PC2-5300 2GB modules on 512Mb chips, which came instead of earlier-announced modules with chips places in two layers.

Overall, the arrival of DDR is not a very instantaneous event (you can see it from the prices), and customers shouldn’t be very sad about that. After all, DDR SDRAM handles all the jobs well enough and even continues developing. In April, OCZ again showed up in this field enhancing its Enhanced Bandwidth initiative, which is not a marketing trick, but a set of real technologies that allow increasing the real performance of memory by reducing data access latencies, although keeping the same frequency.

They also released EB modules on DDR466 chips with a peak bandwidth of 3.7GB/s, so 500MHz version of this product should come here soon. In parallel, the traditional EL series is evolving: this memory is made from carefully selected chips and features low latencies. In April, there appeared 550MHz PC-4400 modules of such memory.