TECH NEWS – DDR5 is already very cheap; too bad we can’t say the same for PC graphics cards…

It’s been a long time since the world has seen such a drastic drop in PC DRAM prices as 2022 has brought. According to TrendForce, DRAM sales revenue fell 32.5% between the third and final quarter of 2022.

That means DRAM has now joined CPUs, which are down 21% year-on-year, and GPUs, which are down 50% and nose-diving in the new year.

TrendForce says the revenue decline, in this case, reflects not so much a drop in units sold as a drop in average selling prices.

Of the big three DRAM manufacturers, Micron has taken the biggest hit. Its revenues fell by a painful 41.2%. Samsung, the largest manufacturer, saw its revenues fall by 25.1%, while second-placed SK Hynix saw its revenues fall by 35.2%.

Samsung appears to have cut prices most aggressively, increasing its market share from 40.7% to 45.1%. In other words, Samsung held some kind of fire sale and sold off a bunch of DRAM cheaply.

PC memory, in general, is, of course, a much more liquid commodity market than CPUs and GPUs.

Although compatibility is not entirely universal for a given memory type, it is much easier to switch from one manufacturer to another in response to the price for DDR4 or DDR5 sticks.

Swapping Intel CPUs for AMD chips is much more complicated. Meanwhile, as far as graphics cards are concerned, with only two major manufacturers (okay, three if you count the new entrant Intel), there is arguably not enough choice to push prices down quickly when demand slumps.

So RAM prices have dropped dramatically – 32 GB DDR5 is available for under $100. At the same time, GPU prices have continued to skyrocket, despite much, much lower demand. An interesting situation, that’s for sure.

Source: Techspot.com