Wednesday, April 17, 2013

It isn't just Kryder's Law

The drastic fall-off in PC shipments as demand switches to tablets isn't just affecting the prospects for Kryder's law reducing storage media costs, even for 2.5" drives:
PC sales are in terminal decline thanks to the continued popularity of tablets and there’s nothing an anticipated surge in ultramobiles can do to stop it.
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Gartner has estimated that this year will see 2.4 billion devices shipped – that’s PCs, tablets and mobile phones combined – growing nine per cent over 2012.
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The number of PCs sold in 2013 will fall 7.6 per cent compared to 2012, to 315 million units, with the only bright spot being ultramobiles, which will increase 140 per cent to 23 million units.
Tablet shipments will surge 69 per cent to 197 million units, while smartphones will make up an ever-increasing slice of the mobile phone pie. Of the 1.875 billion mobile phones Gartner predicts will be sold in 2013, a whopping 1 billion units are predicted to be smartphones, compared with 675 million units in 2012 (out of 1.746 billion).
 It is affecting the prospects for Moore's law reducing the costs of the servers that drive them:
But with memory prices stabilizing after years of double-digit drops, analysts said that DDR3 DRAM will likely have a longer-than-expected life, which could delay the wide adoption of DDR4 in computers. DRAM prices have stabilized as demand for DDR3 has exceeded supply, and the number of memory makers has also dwindled. ...
The volume shipments of PCs and servers are not enough to justify an early switch to DDR4, analysts said. Also, a lot of focus is now on the fast-growing tablet and smartphone markets, so manufacturers are shifting capacity to LPDDR3 and other forms of mobile memory and storage.

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