PC Share of DRAM Shipments Drops Below 50% Since 1980s
PCs are still the main destination for all DRAM manufactured today...but it's declining.
PCs are still the main destination for all DRAM manufactured today, but the PC's share is declining and, for the first time in a generation, PCs have not captured the majority of the DRAM market, market research firm IHS said.
The popularity of tablets and smartphones is to blame for this trend, as PCs accounted for only 49.0 percent of DRAM capacity shipped in the second quarter of this year, down from 50.2 percent in the first quarter. IHS believes that the share will continue to decline and drop to just 42.8 percent by the fourth quarter in 2013. DRAM held a market share of more than 50 percent since the 1980s.
Tablets currently account for 2.7 percent and phones for 12.5 percent. By the end of 2013, IHS expects tablets to be at 6.9 percent and phones at 19.8 percent.
“The arrival of the post-PC era doesn’t mean that people will stop using personal computers, or even necessarily that the PC market will stop expanding,” said Clifford Leimbach, memory analyst at IHS. “What the post-PC era does mean is that personal computers are not at the center of the technology universe anymore - and are seeing their hegemony over the electronics supply chain erode. PCs are no longer generating the kind of growth and overwhelming market size that can single-handedly drive demand, pricing and technology trends in some of the major technology businesses.”
the majority of tablets today use just 512 MB or 1 GB of DRAM, but IHS believes that this amount will grow. By 2015, the common tablet will integrate 2 GB and grow by 30 to 40 percent annually after that.

Haven't needed to buy new ram in years even with several builds - There have been no need as the mem specs are still the same...
Haven't needed to buy new ram in years even with several builds - There have been no need as the mem specs are still the same...
I got 6 gigs of ram and I rarely take up 4 gigs unless I'm running virtual OS's...
hello, Gruener...
I bought 16 gigs of ram for less than $200. I remember when 16 MEGS for that price would have been an awesome deal.
The problem is that there just isn't enough software that can use it all.
I see an article of his and I know its always good for a chuckle.
Wolfgang...will you be touring this summer at comedy clubs ?
Stopped reading there
I know, right? With my first system, i bought and extra 4MB of memory, to put it up to 8MB, for $400 at $100 per 1MB 30 pin SIMM. I ran with only 12MB from 1995 (when I got Windows 95) to 1998. I remember getting 16MB of memory at the same time I got Windows 98.
These days, I have 5 systems in my apartment: two servers (practicing for Hyper-V and ESXi certs) and my main machine at 16GB, my laptop at 8GB, and my HTPC with 4GB. I got the 8GB (paired 4GB DDR3-1600 SODIMMs) for my laptop for only $40. It's crazy how things change.
These days, virtual hosts are the big driving force of the memory demand. I just bought 4 sets of 512GB (32 16GB DDR3-1066 Reg ECC DIMMs, each) for a certain vSphere 5 cluster. Virtual hosts suck down memory and storage like mad. CPUs are too powerful, and never get fully utilized. (The vSphere 5 cluster I partially administer was rarely above 20% CPU utilization across all quad socket 8 core processors with 256GB of virtual machines. That's why we ordered more memory for it instead of adding additional hosts. Sure the memory cost $80k, but it would have been $120k to add 4 more hosts.)
If anyone needs a job, have them learn some sort of virtualization skill. From what I've seen in the job market, Hyper-V, VMWare's vSphere, Xen, and Virtualbox are the big ones. I'm sure some will fall away in time while others get better. In the mean time, I'm ensuring my career by getting certified with Hyper-V and vSphere 5.
you forget multimedia.
with a quad core, or a decent videocard, 1080p 3d is easy enough to play, and much to may people ire, 4k will not catch on like 1080p did, it will come, but wont be here for many years.
fact is we have computers that are good enough, and even if pc gameing was the only way to game, i find it hard to believe that a well coded game would eat a 4 core processor to the extent its unplayable without an upgrade. granted i can see the need to push a more powerfull gpu, but not cpu.