DDR5 Price Set to ‘Substantially’ Narrow Gap With DDR4 in Coming Months
According to a report, the price gap between DDR4 and DDR5 memory modules will soon narrow due to slowing client PC demand, falling memory prices, and increasing supply of DDR5 memory chips. DRAM eXchange.
Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) prices had been trending downwards for some time due to oversupply, but they plummeted from April to June as PC makers and resellers cut back on purchases and lowered inventory levels. Many companies expected demand for client PCs to decline due to geopolitical and macroeconomic tensions.
As a result, DRAM contract prices have deteriorated, with DDR5 prices falling significantly below DDR4 prices. For example, in late July, contract prices for 8GB DDR5 modules dropped by 18.75% ($32.5 on average) compared to the previous period, while contract prices for 8GB DDR4 modules dropped by 13.19% ($25 on average). did.
The $7.50 difference in contract price for an 8GB module is still very significant as it equates to about $15 for a 16GB stick. At retail, the difference easily escalates to almost $40, which is significant. However, the price gap between DDR4 and DDR5 is reported to narrow towards the end of 2022 and early 2023. Digi TimesThis correlates with AMD’s expectations for DDR5 pricing which they announced earlier this week when they launched their Ryzen 7000 series CPUs based on the Zen 4 architecture.
DDR5 memory currently costs significantly more than DDR4 memory, making it attractive for DRAM manufacturers to increase DDR5 supply to capitalize on the difference. However, with more DDR5 memory chips on the market, their prices (and price premium compared to DDR5) are lower. Therefore, DRAM houses are expected to gradually increase the supply of DDR5 so that prices do not collapse. On the other hand, as they increase sales of his DDR5 chips, the competition is likely to increase and in this case prices tend to drop.
Ultimately, this affects the price of the actual memory modules (including enthusiast-grade memory modules for desktops with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 or Intel’s 13th Gen Core CPUs). The only question is how quickly the market for high-end DDR5 DIMMs will decline as a result of increased competition among module houses such as Corsair, G.Skill, Geil and TeamGroup.
In fact, due to competition among module manufacturers, the gap between some dual-channel 32GB DDR4 and DDR5 kits has already closed to 16%, and in some cases, the cost of high-performance 32GB DDR5-6000 memory kits has dropped to 32GB DDR4-4000 kits. is lower than
2x16GB | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Zen 3 | Zen 4 | difference | ||
Default | ||||
DDR4-3200 C16 2x16GB |
$81.97 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
DDR5-5200 C36 2x16GB |
$161.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
98% |
DDR4-3200 C14 2x16GB |
$189.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
DDR5-5200 C28 2x16GB |
$219.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
16% |
Maximum FCLK | ||||
DDR4-4000 C20 2x16GB |
$104.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
DDR5-6000 C36 2x16GB |
$224.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
114% |
DDR4-4000 C14 2x16GB |
$449.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
DDR5-6000 C30 2x16GB |
$289.99 (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab) |
-36% |
Going forward, the gap between DDR4 and DDR5 memory will shrink even further, but we don’t expect DDR5 to be cheaper than DDR4 anytime soon.