Samsung
Time, like a rolling stream, takes away all its sons. Two-channel memories are unlikely to be in the poet’s mind when these words are written, but they are still true. As the industry turns to new technology, prolific memory supplier Samsung is reportedly finding fewer and fewer buyers for the old DDR3 standard. As a result, it is slashing production, according to industry newspaper DigiTimes.
As DDR3 becomes obsolete and demand for next-generation DDR5 memory increases, the newspaper reports (via WCCFTech) that Samsung is slashing the price of DDR3 while also lowering the popular 4GB DDR4 module. There has been a general shift in the market to cheaper memory as demand retreats from the pandemic highs. The Wall Street Journal reported that in the second quarter of 2022 alone, DRAM prices fell by nearly 11% across the board, a dramatic shift even in such a volatile industry.
In this case, Samsung and other memory suppliers have reasons to not emphasize older, lower-margin DDR3 chips, and even shrink DDR4 chips as demand steadily shrinks Production. DDR5 has not yet become an industry standard, although the margins are definitely higher. With the popularity of DDR5, it certainly makes sense to take advantage of this lull in the market to seek dominance, especially if you’re a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
What does this mean for PC lovers? In the short term, the lowest prices for current-generation DDR4 and DDR5 memory may be more affordable than you might imagine for cutting-edge technology. We can see similar trends in the rest of the PC hardware market, as prices for solid-state drives and graphics cards continue to fall after a period of high demand and supply chain woes.
author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who has been building and tweaking desktop computers longer than he likes to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction and salsa verde, in no particular order.
