Gadgetory

we wrote a couple of scripts to scrape the data you're looking at now this is a chart that will dig into later but it shows memory price trends for the year so far we also recently had another report on memory prices with five years of price data and following this we set forth on an information-gathering mission to learn more about how much it costs to actually buy different types of memory as a manufacturer this allowed us to look at just how much the memory suppliers are making the raking and record profits with record highs right now for stocks you can just look at this high necks or micron stock chart for an idea of how much that is and how it linearly compares with the memory prices today we're talking about why and how the memory industry is in the shape its in before that this video is brought to you by the EVGA X 299 dark motherboard the one that we recently use to take a top five world record for fire strike overclocking results the EVGA x 299 dark board is one of the best we've used presently in this current generation and it has a coupon code of gamers nexus for a savings of $75 off for us customers expires on May 31st you've been interested in the X 299 dark with its actual vrm heatsink and actual vrm cooling capabilities that was a good time to grab it use code gamers next to that check out click the link in the description below so this is part 2 of our Ram report series if you want to catch part one and you should check the link we'll put it in the description or in the corner or something in a card the first part aired previously and ugh deep into five years of memory price trends working with PC part picker to collect aggregate data all the way back to 2013 for ddr3 and ddr4 memory what we showed was that in conjunction with the stock price is the memory price is pretty much rose at the same rate at the same time funny how that works so that's what we talked about there we could show some of that throughout this video but you should definitely watch the content if you haven't today we're talking about some more specifics so this is less consumer facing memory prices and more manufacturer phasing and manufacturer for instance would be something like Kingston crucial Corsair or even people like EVGA and a Seuss who make graphics cards that buy memory often directly from these suppliers although occasionally from nvidia and AMD who are also a to memory supplier customers so we're looking at what they pay and our previous Ram price report showed things like ddr4 2133 for instance costing the same today as it did when it launched several years ago so that's not really what you want to see but GD d rh PM flash has miraculously somewhat stagnated and even begun to stabilize so that's an interesting piece we'll be looking at as well the actual cost of a memory die seems like the best place to start our story we're talking the cost that again Nvidia AMD Corsair and all the other manufacturers pay this is what the suppliers sell it to them for modern super fabs can cost upwards of 15 billion dollars and our multi story fabrication facilities that are capable of outputting 150,000 to 200,000 wafers per month they're not fully spun up to those speeds yet but SK Hynix does have such a fabrication facility in Korea Samsung has been working on building there is an outfitting more cleanroom space and this is something that's been widely reported for a while now they're growing through adding cleanroom space and they're expanding their fabrication plants a wafer is a horizontal slice in a silicon crystal a mono crystalline cylinder that gets cut into circular wafers which are then diced into individual dies you've often seen these for Intel or and the unveils of new products for example where they'll hold up a circle that's very shiny and has rainbow colors those individual dices those are the dyes that go on to your products whereas the circle is the wafer SK Hynix is one of the leading memory manufacturers and often the only alternative to Samsung micron is also an alternative but they sometimes compete in different markets micron for instance does not make HP I'm presently Hynix is a new Korean superfab yields approximately 150,000 wafers per month at present and is ramping towards 200,000 eventually each wafer yields about 1500 dyes and we've learned from inside sources at the company that these can be allocated to basically whatever they want all 1,500 and then you have your yields after that the 1500 dyes can be allocated to DRAM flash G DDR memory or HBM depending on what hynek's is building on that line in the absolute best cases for a wafer the companies can profit upwards of $8,000 for one waiver that's the best-case scenario not every way for cells at that they be trillion dollar companies otherwise but the point is if they were to sort of optimize a particular wafer Ron for whatever customer is paying the most they can make a hell of a lot of money and that's at producing over a hundred thousand wafers per month at peak capacity let's get a couple of memory module photos on the screen for the next part and create something of a table we know some prices here SK Hynix negotiates prices with each company individually for gddr5 memory at eight gigabit per second speeds one of the fastest pieces of gddr5 SK Hynix sells it to GPU vendors and board partners at about nine dollars per unit at least that's what we've been told by close sources om like Dell and HP can pay ten to eleven dollars per unit easily and a GPU might have eight of these on it which instantly creates $72 of costs it's no wonder that even the RX for 70s and 570s have skyrocketed in price along with the ten 50s and to some extent the ten 30s that don't have the ddr4 memory considered next that we know gddr5 memory prices were about twenty-five dollars of lower for video card makers last year for eight gigabytes when we previously had insider quotes at around $50 to outfit a card with eight gigabytes of gddr5 this is reflected in some MSRP s that have been officially increased at this point as for HP m - that's where it gets interesting you may have noticed Vega is at limited supply since launch there are two reasons for this but we'll only get into one of them today they got and Titan V both use high bandwidth memory - or HBM - for their frame buffer and memory supply and adding to our chart now a stack of for high HP m2 is sold for about $65 and AMD uses two of those on its vagin 56 and 64 products that's 130 dollars of cost right there and that doesn't count the inner poseur cost the inner poseur cost around twenty to twenty-five dollars what we understand and has its own yield costs baked into that price as well plus package yield costs and is all assembled by a few different package assembly plants adding again to the chart we can list Samsung's HP m2 memory that's eight high and Vidya is starting to transition towards eight height stacks of HP m2 and our understanding is that Samsung charges upwards of $120 per stack for these typically though Nvidia may get special discounts of some kind for perspective back when Andy began planning its parts acquisition for Vega video cards they were looking at around and were pitched around $30 for a four high stack of HB m2 it's considerably more now more than 2x in fact and that is an indicator of just how much the memory market has changed in the last couple of years doesn't have anything to do with AMD they don't make the memory but the point is they were working on it figuring out what memory to buy long before of course we ever got vega cards in our hands and that price changed a lot over the years as for the forthcoming GDD our six something we talked about at GTCC when we were at an sk hynix booth of the show that's looking like it's going to cost about 20 percent more than gddr5 that's straight from one of the manufacturers or one of the representatives at a supplier memory supplier so what you're looking at there is if a vendor pays a sweetheart deal price of nine dollars for an eight gigabit stack of gddr5 eight gigabit per second to be clear what they can expect now is something closer to eleven dollars for a high-speed at GDD are six piece of memory the speeds are still somewhat in flux depending on which manufacturer you look at they have different specs so a 20% hike there it's supposed to come down to 15% eventually 10% as the market matures and more of the lines are switched over to g6 but for now that's what we're looking at as for DRAM this is where we used our custom GN script to scrape memory prices for the last five months or so and we'll keep doing it for the foreseeable future there's really no reason not to so we checked prices every single day for several kits on Newegg and all so checks supplier prices from several different supplier price websites we plotted an overall downtrend in price for ddr4 2133 we can put that on the screen now so twenty one thirty three and twenty four hundred megahertz memory and aggregate at eight gigabit and four gigabit die sizes bought at a downtrend overall that's good from January at the beginning of the year we measured eight gigabit memory at nine point six dollars per unit dropping sharply in March just like the flash that you'll see later to nine dollars and fifteen cents and the price then climbs a bit and flattens it's down overall for the year but still high the afford Gate memory fluctuated more climbing inversely to the eight gigabit memory in march for gigabit memory went from five point two dollars to five point six five dollars as a reminder if you're putting multiple dies on a stick of memory that can start adding up not terribly fast at these prices but certainly a few dollars critically what we also know about DRAM is that server and enterprise users create all of the margin upwards of sixty percent profit margins for the suppliers people like hynek's and samsung would much rather take the memory you could use and sell it to an enterprise company why should you have it or why should we have it if they can make sixty percent margin that's capitalism although there should be obviously some kind of protections in there but either way sixty percent margin is massive and that's what they're looking at for enterprise to be fair there is some extra work done here for example the enterprise companies and the server companies get the highest value of the premium real estate on a wafer the center of the wafers the most valuable there are potential lithography limitations that may result in lower chip quality towards the perimeter of the wafer and so the companies get the first crack at the middle of it that's part of why it's cost priced higher it's prime real estate so this type of memory might be towards the edge is unacceptable for server use but it's perfectly fine for people like us for enthusiasts that does not however change the fact that more and more of the wafers are being allocated for higher margin divisions or higher margin companies that have applications in enterprise server and b2b scenarios so it's the outer edges that get used for something like flash dram or G DDR memory speaking of flash our sources have also informed us that flash memory is one of the easiest products that these companies make to sell and using our script to scrape daily price as a flash supply for the past five months we plotted this chart this is an average daily high price for 64 gigabyte 32 gigabyte and 16 gigabyte flash we plotted an average selling price for ASP of 4.8 dollars to four point eight five dollars for 64 gigabytes from January to March in mid-march we saw a sharp down tick to the tune of 5% rivaling that the previous down dick we saw dropping to four point five dodge this has since begun trending back up for a 32 gigabyte flash we observed relatively flat line performance at 3 dollars 15 cents us dropping at the same time as the 64 gigabyte flash down to 295 the 16 gigabyte flash went up 14 cents in march then dipped back towards $3 flash memory has been somewhat stabilized a much different behavior than what we've seen in dram flash memory manufacturers have finally come to consensus on moving to 3d NAND or VNL end and have largely consolidated on 64 layered designs although hynek's is moving into higher later accounts than that this consolidation of technology has allowed flash memory to reach a more stable output as the R&D process to develop multi-layer v-nand designs cost production resources during the period of development for one final chart here's the consumer facing aggregate prices we scraped data for about a dozen kits of memory over the past 5 months and we combined the kids at various speeds and averaged them here the green line represents high speed at 16 gigabyte kits overall we're seeing the ddr4 3030 200 mega Hertz pricing for 16 gigabytes fluctuate the most wildly it's sitting presently at an average between our small sample size of about two hundred and four dollars the year started with them at 215 spiked to 250 dollars and has come down more recently for 8 gigabyte kits of various speeds represented by orange blue and red lines were seen some fluctuation with the recent downtrend for eight gigabytes 24 hundred megahertz by ten percent we also monitored a similar $10 though not 10% reduction an eight gigabyte 3030 200 megahertz memory it's still about two to three times what it used to be and what it should be but it's theoretically dipping at least that's what you could think based on this we don't have enough long-term data to know whether this is a temporary dip or an ongoing trend you have to treat it like a stock chart we don't really know where it's going we don't know if this is just part of some tiny dip that's brief or if there's actually a downtrend in price which unlike a stock chart is probably something you want to see the new class-action lawsuit also obfuscates thins and complicates pricing mental games so we'll see if that impacts things probably much much later in the future and one final important note here as memory demand has continued to climb and as these companies have expressed limited cleaner and space issues it seems that the objective of some of the companies has changed micron has publicly stated as we recently discussed in our ram supplier class-action lawsuit discussion micron has publicly stated that the company is no longer interested in gaining market share not something you hear a whole lot of when there's a market with only three competitors and you're not the biggest one but that's not what they're interested in anymore they're interested in max profit per wafer to some extent you can't blame them their company if they put in more effort and they make less money per unit it feels like wasted effort you'd see at some point a crossover where for a certain amount of minimum effort to maximum dollars your company is the most profitable that seems to be what they're shooting for that is what they've somewhat led on publicly and we could connect the dots the rest of the way as for whether or not that's legally acceptable when you have three suppliers who control nearly 100% of the market we'll see that's for the courts to decide and it looks like it's been and where this class-action goes we should at least have a response within the next 20 days or so from the memory suppliers on that market of course they will almost certainly refute it but they should have to basically go line by line paragraph by paragraph and highlight each individual point in the HBS law class-action filing which is presently in complaint form no proof of wrongdoing yet just to remind everyone I just love to see where it goes the point is though companies are making more money than they've ever made before and if you're wondering what it costs to buy the memory for the products you buy now you know it's not cheap especially with so many modules on a single component so with micron focusing on profits other companies couldn't follow suit if not already and with prices and speaking with our sources at suppliers we've learned that these companies as they've told us are making more money than ever before not really a secret with public companies they also treat everyone who isn't a server or enterprise company as lower priority that includes ddr4 makers one of the folks we spoke with who works at a memory supplier didn't even know who Corsair was so that just shows you how far off the radar enthusiasts can be Kingston sure there a server company to a large extent they sell memory to server companies but Corsair in the eyes of some of these folks pretty small company and a final note of optimism here for you one of the things we brought up with our newfound sources at these companies was that some analysts have previously projected memory prices that's coming down towards the end of 2018 that statement was met with laughter it's not going to come down in that timeframe according to people very close to the actual cost of these products unless of course this class action changes things but those are slow and there's nothing concrete yet just to complain so there's your there's your inside for the memory industry you know what it costs to buy memory now these numbers we've validated in a couple of locations with different different sources at different companies and we're pretty confident in them and HBM alone is exceptionally expensive prohibitively for some devices which would be why you see the reduced quantity of things like bago or at least the higher prices for something like Vega compared to gddr5 it's not like AMD is trying to rip us all off it's that they are being forced to pay a lot of money for the memory that's going on it more than they planned for same goes for things like the Titan V although it's expensive for other reasons probably because it miscalculated its own price but that's all for this one subscribe for more Zoe's go to store die cameras axis dot net to pick up one of our mod mats or one of our 3d cubes that we've got with the GN tear down logo in it it's a giant glass cube that you could use for hand-to-hand combat go to patreon.com/scishow and access for more I'll see you all next time that was the best one ever