NAND: The Newest Threat To DRAM Manufacturers?

Posted 07/18/2011 at 11:15am | by Brad Chacos

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Like Jennifer's Lopez's marriage, DRAM manufacturers are going through a bit of a rough patch. DRAM insiders were popping Cristal when the industry saw a 77 percent surge in revenues between 2009 and 2010, but thanks to a dramatic death-spiral in DRAM prices, those same executives could soon be snuggling up to Wall Street bankers and MD 20/20 in the gutter. Today, a report surfaced that indicates that things could get worse before they get better for DRAM manufacturers; some experts theorize that PC owners may shift away from DRAM into the open arms of NAND flash memory.

Market research group Objective Analysis examined a wide assortment of memory configurations and PC benchmarks, Computerworld reports, and they've concluded that adding a "dollar's worth of NAND flash improves PC performance more than adding a dollar's worth of DRAM." That's bad news for DRAM manufacturers, who are already considering cutting back production to artificially inflate prices. On the other hand, the cost of NAND memory continues to drop, and the industry expects to see a 79 percent increase in worldwide supply in 2011.

"An appropriate balance of NAND, DRAM, and an HDD yields superior performance per dollar to a simple DRAM/HDD system," Jim Handy, the author of Objective Analysis' report, told Computerworld. "A well-designed NAND/DRAM combination brings SSD-like performance to a system at little or no price increase over a standard system based on the conventional DRAM-plus-HDD platform."