I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was <$0.50.
The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.
Then you have “acts of God” like that time when a flood or fire or something caused the only factory in the world that produced some obscure part of memory chips to stop production and memory costs double almost overnight. I remember my 4 -> 32 MB back in the 90s cost a fortune because of this.
A great example for the pork cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
Old enough here to remember Intel exiting the DRAM business.
Same! And then they made new eDRAM for a hot minute as part of Crystal Well. It'd be fun to see them get back into the game in a serious way, but their on-again-off-again attitude toward dGPUs does not give me confidence in their ability to execute on such long-term plans.
Old enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business :-)