RAM price going up like crazy.

[CougTek]

My suppliers have increased the price of the DDR SDRAM modules by some 20% in the last week only. Will we see 512Mo memory sticks around 200$ like some 5 years ago? Is this the end of the party? Or is the increase simply caused by the market shift to DDR2 modules?

 

[Mercutio]

Probably the second one.
I know it's getting to be about time for a switch because I actually have a bunch of spare DDR modules and all my home PCs are full.

 

[Buck]

For me, DDR has gone up in price while DDR2 has gone down in price.

 

[ddrueding]

So when is AMD joining the party?

 

[Buck]

Within the next few months.

 

[P5-133XL]

I quit paying attention to RAM prices a long time ago. Prices go up, prices go down in rather unpredictable ways with lots of rumors as to why. If you really need price stability then increase the price of your systems to incorporate the risk.

 

[Adcadet]

damn. I'm still running on 512 MB of DDR and am about at the end of my rope having to keep ctr-alt-del to kill off memory-wasting processes/programs. When I built this computer I decided to see how long I could tolerate 512...looks like it will be a while longer.

 

[Mercutio]

So when is AMD joining the party?

That would be May 23rd. Which is good, 'cause - much as I hate to say it - Intel's next generation chips (Yonah-core) are supposed to be by better in every possible way compared to current X2s.

 

[Pradeep]

And switching to DDR2 seems to have only given AMD ~5% performance boost in most cases. Interesting times ahead. They will really need to pull something out of the hat later on this year.

 

[P5-133XL]

In theory, putting both companies into the same RAM format should decrease RAM costs because of increased ecconomies of scale. So even without a performance improvement it should be benificial. However, that benefit, like performance, may be negligible. We'll just have to wait and see.

I agree, I want to see what AMD has to counter Conroe...

 

[Tannin]

As I understand it, there is a very good reason why AMD has taken so long to release a DDR2 unit: because of the different (read "less sucky") arcitecture, the AMD chips benefit only marginally from DDR2 so they made it a low priority. This is why DDR2 Athlons have taken so long, and this is also why they won't make any difference worth talking about when they arrive. The P4, on the other hand, lives and dies by its RAM speed. (What else could you expect with a bizarre cache design and cripplingly slow task-switching?) That is why Intel (instead of AMD, who used to do this stuff back in Athlon Classic days when the boot was on the other foot) are always the firm to push bus speeds and RAM speeds higher first these days. Summary: the P4 needs DDDR2, the Athlon 64 doesn''t particularly care either way.