According to a recent post by market intelligence firm TrendFocus, SSD prices have jumped over 36% year over year in certain areas despite increasing shipments suggesting demand for flash memory is currently significantly outpacing supply. Trendfocus speculates that these prices are likely to stay inflated until at least 2018, when production of flash memory is expected to increase to match demand.

The current NAND shortage has been caused by a perfect storm of factors which include the transition by all NAND manufacturers to 3D NAND production, major increases in storage capacities of smartphones and significantly increased amounts of laptops adopting [...]

In case you haven’t heard, there’s been a massive NAND shortage in the industry due to a combination of lower production along with higher than expected demand.

According to a recent report by market intelligence firm, DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, mainstream client SSDs are feeling the effects of the shortage as contract prices are expected to increase over 10% in the 1Q2017. MLC based products are expected to see a price increase of 12%-16% and TLC based products are expected to see a price increase of 10%-16%. As a result of the shortage, shipments of client SSDs are expected to drop 7%-8% in 1Q2017.

Due to customer preferences, the [...]

Despite their financial woes, Toshiba has reason to celebrate today as they were recently named the fastest growing HDD and SSD maker in both revenue and units in 2016 by market intelligence firm IDC.

According to the IDC “Worldwide 4Q16 HDD Shipment Results and Four-Quarter Forecast Update” report, Toshiba’s HDD unit market share increased by 9% in 4Q2016, reaching a total of 24% market share in the $25 billion HDD market in 2016. In 2016, Toshiba was the only HDD manufacturer to see an increase in revenue.

Further, according to the IDC “Worldwide Solid State Storage Quarterly Update, CY 4Q16” report, Toshiba’s SSD [...]

Amid massive shortages due to increased demand, the NAND Flash market is booming. According to latest report from market intelligence firm, TrendForce, revenues have increased a massive 17.8% quarter over quarter, now reaching a total of $12 Billion in 4Q2016.

Looking at the results, the biggest winners in the 4Q2016 is Micron, which saw revenue increase by 26.9%. This is followed by Intel which saw revenue increase by 25.7%, Western Digital by 22% and Samsung by 19.5%. Toshiba and SK Hynix saw the lowest revenue increases at 8.5% and 9% respectively.

In terms of marketshare, Samsung once again dominated the market by a massive margin. In 4Q2016, [...]

Remember all those guys spewing all that non-sense on how smartphones and tablets are going to replace gaming PCs? Well, it looks like it hasn’t gone to plan. The PC gaming market is exploding, now reaching a massive $30 Billion with a projected 6% CAGR through 2019, according to market intelligence firm Jon Peddle Research. Previously, the PC gaming hardware market wasn’t expected to reach $30 Billion until 2018. PC Gamers FTW.

According to the research numbers, the $30 Billion market is split into three categories – Entry Level, Mid-Range, and High-End. The High-End portion of the market, which is led by North American and Western [...]

Samsung recently told investors that they’re planning to make some of the biggest investments into their semiconductor facilities this year and the accelerated development of next generation DRAM may be one of the results of that investment.

According to Business Korea sources, Samsung is planning to accelerate development their next generation 1ynm product (15nm or 16nm) in order to begin mass producing it by 2H2017. Further, Samsung expects to continue ramping up 18nm DRAM production as well, expecting 10nm class DRAM to make up half of Samsung’s DRAM shipments by 2H2017.

It was previously estimated that Samsung would completely shift to 10nm [...]

Market intelligence firms Gartner and IDC recently posted their latest estimates on the global PC market in 3Q2016 and once again, things aren’t looking too hot for the industry.

According to Gartner, PC shipments dropped 5.7% in the 3Q, marking the 8th consecutive quarter PC shipments have dropped. Despite the difficult market HP, Dell and ASUS, still saw around a 2.3-2.6% increase in shipments. On the other hand, the biggest losers include Apple, Acer, and “Others” who saw declines around 13.4-16.2%. While the overall industry declined, Mobile PCs such as notebooks, 2-in-1 PCs and Windows tablet shipments increased [...]

According to a recent report from market intelligence firm TrendForce, supply shortages and surging demand from the 3Q2016 will continue into 4Q2016 increasing prices of NAND Flash. This will cause price increases of eMMC, eMCP and SSDs extending through the 4th quarter.

The main driver of increasing prices is due to smartphone demand. Smartphone demand has started to boom in the 2H2016 with sales of the iPhone 7 on the upswing causing major constrains on supply. Apple doubled capacities on each of the iPhone 7 models representing a substantial increase in NAND Flash consumption. Similarly, other brands such as Huawei, OPPO and Vivo are ramping up production and [...]

If you’ve been thinking of building a new system this holiday season, it may be worthwhile to start picking up memory early as prices continue to rebound thanks to increasing demand and a constrained supply.

Back in September, we reported that PC DRAM prices are expected to increase 15% by the end of this year, but a new report from DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, is forecasting that DRAM prices will increase by 30%, which will put PC DRAM at its highest price in two years. During 3Q2016, memory makers scaled back PC DRAM production down to just 20% of the total production in order to expand mobile and server DRAM production. This in combination with [...]

According to a recent report from Infiniti Research, the global GPU market is expected to surpass 67.71 million units by 2020.

Although hardly surprising, driving growth of the GPU market will be due in large part to the increasing adoption of integrated GPUs especially in notebooks which has accounted for more than 63% of total marketshare in 2015. Intel has been bundling their integrated GPUs with their mainstream processors for years in both desktop and notebook parts while AMD’s APUs have become one of their best selling products in both the desktop and notebook space which offers excellent value proposition for budget and midrange systems.

For [...]