Way to go, semiconductor suppliers. Thanks to you, we’re all going to be paying more for our PCs going forward. Possibly a lot more.
The main culprits are D-Ram memory chips, which have seen a 23 per cent price increase this year and make up 10 per cent of a computer’s cost. The move from DDR2 to DDR3 is primarily what’s wreaking havoc. Memory’s not alone, though: while the overall cost of semiconductor components has declined by an average of 7.8 per cent per year since 2000, the Financial Times reports that this year Gartner analysts expect them to go up 2.3 per cent. LCD panels are also tapped for a 20 per cent cost increase.
It remains to be seen how much of the cost is going to be passed along to consumers, but there’s no way that the component prices can increase this much and the end product can keep getting cheaper. It was a good ride while it lasted, but it’s almost time to pay the PC piper. [FT via Ars Technica]
matt
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 11:25 AMwhy?
is this fallout from the GFC?
Red T-Rex
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 12:40 PMThis is the usual case when changing chip types. The old RAM will have fallen to it’s lowest price due to economies of scale and improvement in efficiencies of production over the life of the product. It will bottom out as demand starts to shift to the new technology and then start to increase in price as production is scaled back and it gets increasingly harder to find. The new RAM will have started out being expensive but will usually drop rapidly as economies of scale take effect as demand increases and over it’s life will drop further as more efficient production mechanisms are implemented.
The jump in price is sometimes more noticable than others depending on where each technology is on it’s lifecycle as they change over. One theory I have apart from the usual possible factors such cost of raw materials and labour is that the drop in demand of PC’s over the last 12 months (that has now seen a surge thanks to Win 7 and some may say saw a dip thanks to Vista) has contributed to the cost of the new RAM not yet experiencing the demand to get the price down as low as it usually is when changover occus.