5 ms·
I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was <$0.50. The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build
by librasteve 11mo ago
I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was <$0.50.
The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.
- dboreham 11mo agoOld enough here to remember Intel exiting the DRAM business.
- timschmidt 11mo agoSame! And then they made new eDRAM for a hot minute as part of Crystal Well. It'd be fun to see them get back into the game in a serious way, but their on-again-off-again attitude toward dGPUs does not give me confidence in their ability to execute on such long-term plans.
- kabdib 11mo agoOld enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business :-)
- loloquwowndueo 11mo agoThen you have “acts of God” like that time when a flood or fire or something caused the only factory in the world that produced some obscure part of memory chips to stop production and memory costs double almost overnight. I remember my 4 -> 32 MB back in the 90s cost a fortune because of this.
- huseyinkeles 11mo agoA great example for the pork cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
- Cthulhu_ 11mo agoI've often heard it refer to as the bullwhip effect, I think it was this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect