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Comment by zmj | Hacker News Reader

Why would you expect better performance at a lower price?

It is easy. For example you could hire 10000 people to perform calculations for your complex mathematical model (like it was done century ago) or you can buy Raspberry PI to perform the same task in no time. Which will be cheaper?

This is a bad comparison. DRAM margins are razor thin and unlike transistors, DRAM has not gotten much smaller, which is the main cost savings gained from process improvements.

Instead, server and accelerator vendors want ever faster and higher performance DRAM, and so these performance gains trickle down to consumers, but nothing is driving price down.

People on here literally think Moore's is a natural law and if computer hardware isn't getting 15% cheaper every year there must be funny business involved...

Hasn't the DRAM industry gotten in trouble with regulators multiple times for fixing prices?

They have. Giving the industry the benefit of the doubt after decades of price fixing is generous at best.

“To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.”

It’s claimed to be a very high margin industry and supply is artificially constrained to maintain that margin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/283081-dram-manufactur...

I call it the economic fallacy. It's very common, especially on discussion forums like this.

Every problem is only related to how much competition there is, but not to how hard the underlying problem is.

It's somewhat related to the "awareness fallacy": The belief that every problem that humanity has can be solved if just everyone is aware and willing to act.

>DRAM margins are razor thin and unlike transistors, DRAM has not gotten much smaller, which is the main cost savings gained from process improvements.

Should we then expect SRAM to eventually be cheaper than DRAM?

You might see larger in-processor or on-module memory (in a chiplet design). Lots of factors to deal with.

Have those numbers been growing? Don’t have data on hand myself.

Because the manufacturing techniques have improved? You can see the effects of better manufacturing techniques in other parts.

In the end price discovery is supply/demand, and it appears investment in DRAM manufacturing is focused on improving RAM performance, and just keeping up with demand, not outpacing it.

Since the barrier to entry is very high, there's not so much pressure to compete further on price.

While it's true that the market ultimately determines pricing, the fact that manufacturers can stuff larger amounts of RAM into the newer equivalent SKUs means the price per GB for fast memory would still be driven down. This is even possible if new unit prices are higher, i.e. if this year's "entry-level" SKU costs a little more than last year's but now has more capacity.

DRAM is not transistors. Transistors have gotten much smaller much faster than DRAM.

The thing that's gotten smaller is the minimum feature size on a silicon wafer. The same types of etching and doping processes can be used to create many integrated circuits.

DRAM chips are integrated circuts that consist of individual transistors and capacitors for each bit, plus the wiring and logic to read, refresh, and write to those bits. They're substantially transistors.

It's true that logic, power, analog, flash, DRAM, SRAM, and mixed signal ICs do have some significant differences, and some manufacturers optimize for a subset of those capabilities, but they're similar enough that if one industry advances leaps and bounds (like Flash storage and low-power processing have).

So why does DRAM lag behind the others?

> The thing that's gotten smaller is the minimum feature size on a silicon wafer.

No, even minimum feature size is improving much slower than in the past. Fabs are focusing on specifics that are still giving gain: lower power transistors, SRAM. Really high performance transistors like for amps have not gotten much smaller, DRAM has not gotten much smaller, analog has not gotten much smaller.

The capacitors and sense amplifiers in DRAM have not gotten smaller nearly as fast as any of the other features.

> DRAM chips are integrated circuts that consist of individual transistors and capacitors for each bit, plus the wiring and logic to read, refresh, and write to those bits.

I know what a DRAM is...

That’s a very satisfying answer. I’m aware that the processes for logic, flash, and DRAM have some significant differences but I don’t know much more than “differences exist” (e.g. and therefore you have a different die for CPU and flash).

My reasoning is, at best, “SSDs have gotten cheaper, SSDs are kind of like RAM, shouldn’t RAM get cheaper?” and I know that’s not exactly an expert opinion.

SSDs are non-volatile — they don’t need power and constant refreshing like DRAM does. So you can do different things based on a different heat and power budget, like going 3D and adding more layers that would kill regular ram or a cpu, etc.

NAND flash went from one layer to 128 layers over the last decade while DRAM is still one layer.

Because historically this happens in every technology.

Eventually, but not on release.

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