| Dark_Feanor said: Economy of scale doesn´t work for a thing that is a commodity because they are already in a very, very large production scale. The DDR2 price you are thinking is for consumer level standalone products. Or, if we think in your logic, we have to assume that the CELL BE and Xeno processors prices are dramtically increasing since 2007, as PS3 and XOne are the only ones using those processor (or worst, basically the last one using PowerPC archtecture). Rest assure the XOne DDR price will no increase. Besides, the DDR is the lest concern for the XOne price. |
That very very very large production scale you speak of? Has been declining.
Hynix had a fire at one of it's fabrication facilities.
OCZ left the DRAM market.
Elpida went bankrupt.
Shift to DDR4.
Shift to LDDR3.
Scaled back DDR3 production during financial crisis.
Thus by extension less production of plain-jane DDR3, supply and demand then plays into it, if you have more demand than you can supply, prices then naturally rise.
The Playstation 3 was a little different, it had dedicated production facilities for it's Ram, Microsoft and Sony this time however are relying far more heavily on 3rd parties.
During the financial crisis DRAM was sitting in massive piles in warehouses, which costs money, so prices dropped to record lows to shift volume, then as the US and other nations started to recover so did demand, then you had all the other issues that compounded the issue of price, that I listed above.
The consoles aren't immune to these pricing fluctuations, however they would have contracted deals, but they can end up changing. (Case in point, GPU prices for the first Xbox, Microsoft wanted them cheaper, nVidia didn't.)
As for the Cell and other processors, the reason why they get cheaper is because they take advantage of newer fabrication node processes, thus they get smaller and cheaper to produce, DRAM market is far more volatile.
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