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Part of the reason why RAM prices are dropping (or why they used to be high)

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They need to increase the penaltiesto a much higher level where a fine becomes an actual deterrent. It's a known fact, stated by CEOs of various companies in all types of industry, that decisions to do such things are made as a business decision. If they can make more overall by doing something like pricefixing and then paying a fine they do it.

Too bad the consumers who really paid for it don't see a dime of this money :bang head the majority gets funneled back to another corporation :-/
 
About a year ago IIRC, a senior manager from Samsung agreed to serve an 8 month jail sentence for essentially the same offense. Somethings never change, and you wonder just what it'd take to make big business not to act like scum. Personally, I don't think anything will. Business is business. I'm willing to bet that a lot of these companies have fines worked into their budget anyways.
 
To my knowledge, in some parts of the UK opening your store on Easter Sunday is illegal. However large stores take the hit in the form of a fine because they will far surpass the fine in the profit they make that day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_shopping

It's the way businesses work :-\
 
From my perspective, this is really bad as it has made a lot of actual DIMM manufacturers look bad as many people automatically attribute pricing back to the manufacturer. All pricing is usually a simple formula and memory is a pretty low margin product. It really sux that no matter where in the link the problem lies, we consumers get hosed no matter what.

I hope this trend will continue and allow memory companies to offer high performance memory for reasonable prices.
 
Edit:

Im glad to see Rambus screwing over all these D-Ram manufactures, as they all violated rambus's NDA and used there technology with the help of the scumm lords JEDEC. Rambus has since been screwed over by the FTC to make matters worse, FTC reduced there loyalitys- and actually ending all loyalities in 3 years.

I would hope that Rambus would actually go into manufacturing and make there own chips. Sure would help in the long run.


Btw, Those who say "Rambus ram sucked"

Yeah.....Were not talking about that. Rambus Technology is/was used in Sdram,DDR, GDDR and Etc, only according to FTC/JEDEC that DDR2 was a "new" technology. Which comes from retarded politicians getting in the way of a non educated FTC ruling. We know that DDR2 was still built on Rambus's Technology....( Its just Jedec has the government lobbiest to back them)
 
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Source: second article linked in the Dailytech article referred to above by Gautam.

A saga that has been cumulating for the last eight years is about to take another major step. Seven of the major eight DRAM manufacturers will face a major antitrust complaint filing tomorrow lead by Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Lockyer's filing for the State of California will be followed by additional suits in thirty-three more states shortly after.

The complaint claims that between 1998 and 2002 seven manufactures colluded to "fix DRAM chip prices, artificially restrain supply, allocate among themselves the production of DRAM chips and markets for the chips, and rig bids for DRAM chip contracts."

These actions referred to in the article took place quite a while back and are only now hitting the point of fines being charged. It usually takes quite a while for these kinds of activities to go from allegations thru the judicial system and to the point of fines, penalties and the likes.

I don't believe that they have very much to do with current pricing folks. I believe that recent pricing was high due to everyone getting on the DDR2 train and everyone wanting to ride that train on Micron chips. As the initial surge in demand decreased and the options (Promos, Elpida, etc) increased, the pricing has adjusted accordingly.

Just my $.02's worth.
 
jstutman said:
Edit:

Im glad to see Rambus screwing over all these D-Ram manufactures, as they all violated rambus's NDA and used there technology with the help of the scumm lords JEDEC. Rambus has since been screwed over by the FTC to make matters worse, FTC reduced there loyalitys- and actually ending all loyalities in 3 years.

I would hope that Rambus would actually go into manufacturing and make there own chips. Sure would help in the long run.


Btw, Those who say "Rambus ram sucked"

Yeah.....Were not talking about that. Rambus Technology is/was used in Sdram,DDR, GDDR and Etc, only according to FTC/JEDEC that DDR2 was a "new" technology. Which comes from retarded politicians getting in the way of a non educated FTC ruling. We know that DDR2 was still built on Rambus's Technology....( Its just Jedec has the government lobbiest to back them)

What are you talking about? The so-called 'Rambus technology' in RAM was nothing more than Rambus patenting standards which were talked about in JEDEC meetings and agreed to by all parties.
 
Otter said:
More likely Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ and the like.
Actually, Dvboard is right. I don't know exact percentages but, if you add all the enthusiast RAM in the world together for any given year, it will probably not equal what Dell alone buys. Enthusiast computing is a tiny percentage of global sales which is a major part of the reason that there is so little IC allocation for "us". OEM dwarfs what "we" buy and they are the priority of the major memory fabs.

Until about a month ago, Dell OEM memory was still being made with D9s. They recently switched to some Samsung IC. This in itself has probably freed up some D9 for the enth market.
 
Yellowbeard, are you saying that Corsair actually makes more than half it's income from the likes of us? That's a surprise. I thought Corsair also focused primarily on OEM's. I wouldn't call Kingston "enthusiast RAM" by any stretch of the imagination, and didn't mean to imply that the DIY market was more than a drop in the memory ocean. Perhaps it's as much as two drops in the ocean, though, if your company mainly sells to people who build and upgrade their own machines.

Do Dell, HP, and Gateway actually stuff their own RAM modules in their own factories, or do they contract that out? I was assuming they'd buy modules in bulk from specialized manufacturers, perhaps in Taiwan or China, but now that you mention it, maybe they do stuff their own RAM.
 
instead of saying: The fine will be divided into: $80 million to be returned back to those affected by the schemes and the rest to be distributed among local and state government bodies.

it should read: The fine will be divided into: $80 million will go to the lawyers in the case and the rest will be distributed among local and state government bodies.
 
Otter, I have no idea of the internal breakdown of how much Corsair sells of each type of product. But, based on what I have seen of Dell, Gateway, and your other big OEMs, they buy their memory from the big players such as Samsung, Micron, Kingston, etc.
 
i doubt amd vs intc would have price fixing. they're competing against each other so badly that prices keep dropping every few months!

as for the price fixing, please let us see prices drop so i can get 2gb memory!
 
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