DRAM Manufacturers Ramp Up Production

can't they do the same thing with HDD?
is there anyone who even uses DRAM?

fail.....
all of the stuff is flooded and evrybody uses dram, phones computers etc. The very computer you are using is using dram.

and to think RAM can't get any cheaper.........
at this rate, I might just get a X79 board and run my system on 64GB of ddr3

How is this not collusion? Wikipedia states collusion is "an agreement among firms to divide the market, set prices, or limit production", and is this not an agreement to limit production?

you know with haveing to much ram... you would think they would invest more in higher density 8gb sticks and make them the norm. drive those prices down to reasonable levels.

i have 8gb of ddr2, and cant realistically get more ram, because it would be cheaper to get a new motherboard and load that up with 16-24gb of ram than to get 16gb of ddr2... what im waiting for right now is for 8gb sticks to come to a reasonable price. im already constantly using 7.5gb+ right now, i don't even have all the programs i want open.

I'm guessing they didn't actually have any agreement. They each independently had their financial people tell them that there is a dramatic price decline. Heck, they can notice that themselves, we all have. Knowing that there is a price decline, they each independently decided to cut their production simply because the price they will sell might be actually lower than the cost of production, so they would take a loss on each sale and it doesn't take a genius to decide that they should cut production. The key is they each decided independently from the others without any agreement.

Anyway, that's the principle. I'm not saying they didn't have any agreement. They might have had in secret. I'm just saying that it is plausible that they each decided to cut production based on the market condition.

Sounds right now a good time to stock up on some ram chips.
But however, I am afraid of my investment getting trumped by the next gen of RAM, whatever it may be. It seems like a new gen of ram comes out every 4/5 years and DDR3 is at the 5 year mark(serious production in 2007).
Oh well, we shall see.

where is the 8Gb module when you need it to be just as cheap per GB as 4Gb ones?

Personally, I am betting more towards the illegal collusion argument here..... seen way too many times these tech companies having 'dirty laundry' come out a few months/years after they do something like this that shows that, yep, they were colluding.

8 Gb sticks will come down in price, but what I want to see is better speed and timings on them. Most of the stuff out now, besides being expensive, is only 1333.

actually at the bottom, 1333 and 1600 are about the same price for 8 GB (2x4GB), at 4 GB (2x2GB), 1600 is cheaper than 1333.

Basic supply and demand. Too much supply, and there will be no demand. Too much demand leaves no supply. They're balancing that out to sell at a good price point. If they didn't (and proceeded to continue pumping out more and more dram that wasn't needed) they wouldn't make enough money to support the continued production of unneeded dram.

This is completely different than collusion. Collusion is if they would limit how much they produce when demand is high. IE if prices were still really high on the ddr3 stuff, and they limited production to pump it higher, that would be collusion. But if it's bottoming out to a point where it's not very profitable, it's not.

Wake me up when most games utilise more than 4gb of ram.

If they were all US manufactures there would be a collusion issue but there is little in place in many countries and internationally to stop collusion. If there were, OPEC would be illegal. The best protection against collusion is to have a lot of independent producers. And that goes for any market. Once you get 20-30 producers, supply manipulations get difficult unless they have to rely on the same raw materials suppliers because keeping everyone together and honest becomes impossible just based on some agreement were there is no way to force compliance. This is how ideally a market should run...20 or more independent companies of a comparable product or service available to the consumer.

You have the right idea, but remember that supply is not based on demand or vice versa, they are independent factors.

It should actually read: too much supply relative to demand, and there is excessive surplus of a product; too much demand, there is a shortage of that product.

Discrepancies in how much the producer is willing to produce and how much the consumer wants to consume are solved by changing the price of the product. All of this can happen without collusion.

If all you do is play games buy a console, some of us edit HD video, the LEDs on my Ballistix Tracer go frikken crazy when I set a batch off

If ssds didn't help gaming would you say other pcs don't need it?

computer illiterate?

Why the crap are people bringing up SSDs here. This is about DRAM, not NAND flash memory.

This just goes to show that the actual cost of making the RAM happens to be a lot more cheaper then we're actually paying for it. If they had let the production continue without the stop then we would have seen a further drop in the prices, which, the big players didn't want, since the profit margins fall for other companies that are also manufacturing RAM.
This is a lot like organized crime, but with a white collar. Hopefully one day these chaps will also get caught in the illegal practices rap.

i still wish we could ram up our hdd quantity.Seems like WD and Seagate arent doing anything.

IMHO, the other people who posted are looking for cheap prices on 8GB x 1 modules. I'm investigating a new build, and 8GB x 1 modules would be great for a 32 GB build, however, current prices for them are more than double that of a 4 GB x 2 kit, making the decision to go with 8GB x 1 modules (considering using them on an X79 board) difficult at best.

Wow, people are whining about Ram prices not being so low that the manufacturers were actually loosing money when they were sold, ram prices hit the floor last summer/fall to about where they are now (give or take $5). All that w have felt is a steady price of ram for the past 4 months. 8G single sticks are still expensive as hell, but that's part of the game as the manufacturing process for those needs to continue to mature. It's like Sony's crapshoot when it came to PS3's running the cell processors. They had problems with yields so they turned off a few cores. Though unlike that, with ram you HAVE to throw away the entire chip.

Ram Manufacturers overshot their projections, their warehouses were full of product, and no-one was buying at the current price.

Solution?

1.Sell your backstock and slow/halt production so you can clean out your backstock. Maybe use the downtime to retool your facilities as you can.

2. Don't stop production, and find yourself swimming in product. Drown.

There's always some price manipulation, but if you can get 16GB for $79 that's still pretty good.

That all depends on the country. Price fixing and collusion is likely not illegal in the areas with most of the RAM foundries.

I'd like to get RAM as much as my hard-drive. Once something is read from HDD, it would stay in RAM (until the next reboot), so HDD would never read the same thing twice, like a super cache :-) So 1 or 2TB would be nice :-)

Oh damn, does this mean I should be buying my 8GB modules for my PC now then?

You're over-simplifying it a little. Any changes made to data that's read from the hard drive would need to be written back to it, possibly re-read afterwards to reduce damage done from loss of power. If you have data loaded in DRAM that isn't on the hard drive or is in a different form from the copy on the hard drive and you lose power, you will be stuck with whatever is left on the hard drive because DRAM is volatile.

That means that it needs power running to it or it loses it's data, unlike HDDs, Flash, optical disks, and some other memory technologies. Technically, you can get a system with 1TB or 2TB of RAM, but it will cost a lot of money... There are quad CPU servers that support such memory arrangements. You can go to dell.com or other similar sites and look into the servers if you want proof. The 1TB arrangement is generally much cheaper than the 2TB, well under half the price, kinda like the price difference between 4GB and 8GB modules, except with 16GB and 32GB modules instead.

Sometime collusion is a good idea, if you want to keep the industry healthy, otherwise you will lose all but the ones that could survive and you end up with an unhealthy industry that is run by a single company and no competition.

Collusion is probably more thought of when it's done in a bad way, to ramp up profits to deplorable levels on all or almost all viable products for a certain function. It also means that the assorted companies involved need to be doing it in concert, under agreements (informal, illegal) to do it. Like you said, doing it or something similar can be good for an industry when it's products rapidly lose profit margins because of high supply and low demand. When we have DRAM selling so close to zero and even negative profits, there is a problem that needs to be solved.

Decreasing supply is a good solution because demand isn't really going to increase much, if at all. Decreasing supply allows stockpiled products to be sold out instead of added upon because the supply is increasing faster than demand. DDR3 has had a pretty long run and seems to have quite some time left before DDR4 comes out, so DRAM manufacturers have probably had it kinda hard because of the large amount of time (relative to the previous generations of system memory) that DDR3 has been going and will continue to go before the next DDR refresh with DDR4.