wizard said:
To the contrary my good man do know a bit about companies and how they fail. Our recent history is filled with examples of companies where the only thing of intrest was profits, profits that bypassed the share holders and went right into the pocket of the company officers.
Sustainable profits require that a company focus on its customer needs, providing good value and keeping an eye on the competition.
There is only one thing I really need to say to reply to this:
Apple Computers - Going out of business since 1976.
Nope not joking at all!
I might be off by a few months but I expect that by 2007 all desktop hardware will be sold as dual processor 64 bit systems on both i86 and Apple platforms. The advantages for all that addressing range will be with respect to the OS. Since a large number of i86 systems ship with base RAM of 1GB I don't think I'm over extending things at all here.
I think you're off your rocker and don't know anything about the setbacks, issues, and other problems facing every computer company on the market right now. Intel is repeatedly canceling and pushing back their deadlines, and the new 915/925 chipsets they hyped to motherboard manufacturers on the promise of PCI Express are sluggish and not moving too much. Their plan for dual-core is laughable and won't achieve any kind of serious fruition, other than in name, until roughly 2006-2007 without a major breakthrough of some sort. Meanwhile, they're slowly killing off the Pentium 4M desktop replacement market and pushing for everyone to use the Pentium M and the next-generation Celeron M (which will be a Dothan core, hobbled to not compete with a true Pentium M). In similarly dire straits, AMD is focusing their dual-core efforts entirely on the server market with Opterons and revision to HyperTransport, having only the vaguest of roadmaps to their release of a K8 dual-core in the consumer space sometime in 2005-2006.
The leaders in this race are IBM - who already sell dual-core parts, but only in Big Iron - and Freescale.
Oh, and I guess the fact that the majority of computer sales are bargain-bin machines doesn't affect your predictions, does it? How about the fact that a $599 computer would need more than double its base price to take any serious advantage from being 64-bit?
Yes and a few months from now the price will be half what it is now. Two years out 4GB sticks should be in the same ball park. This really shouldn't surprise anybody in this industry.
Actually, you're wrong. Memory density in DDR1 is hitting the wall around PC3200 and 2GB thanks to the chip traces and the voltages that they need to be run at, which is one reason that it's so expensive to get a stick of 1GB at the moment. Most manufacturers are starting to bank on DDR2 and the FBGA (fine ball grid array) technique to lower core voltage while allowing a theoretical increase in density. However, FBGA is more expensive and difficult to manufacture than the traditional TSOP chips and will result in higher prices for at least a year while manufacturers recoup the costs of shifting their production and taking up the new model. Even then, the process itself is just more complicated.
If you have followed computing for any length of time you would realize that RAM price drops quickly after introduction. At this point we are in a transistion to a new DRAM standard which might put a bubble in the ramping to larger size memory arrays but after the bubble bursts we will still have the same reality. That is that competition and demand will drive the cost of the next gen memory systems down just like it does today.
Ah, right... Like how the gigabyte sticks are still multiple hundreds of dollars if you want anything with quality?
It is farily easy and economical, today to put 2 GBs into the average desktop. By this time next years I expect that 4 GBs will be in reach also. The hardware is just coming on the market, so the prices are already at the top of the slope, it is only down from here.
Economical?
Most of the non-premium motherboards I see are 2-3 slot designs, usually with only the first two usable with PC3200. With that in mind:
PDP PC3200 1GB - $162
Corsair Value Select PC3200 1GB - $196
PGI Turbo PC3200 1GB - $204
So, you're looking at $350 minimum for un-paired RAM. That's not exactly cheap, especially if you consider how many computers are bought for less than a thousand dollars.
