The rapid decline in demand for graphics cards in recent quarters and the end of component shortages in 2021 has caused the price of GDDR6 memory to plummet.As noticed To 3DCenter.org, GDDR6 spot prices have fallen to more than a quarter of what they used to be over the past year and a half. Currently, 8GB of his GDDR6 is priced at $27 on the spot market. This certainly raises the question why both AMD and Nvidia chose not to include more than 16GB of memory in many of their best graphics cards.
Back in February 2022, an 8Gb GDDR6 chip (1GB) was priced at around $13 on the spot market. It is, according to data from DRAM eXchangea market intelligence firm, edited by. Reddit User – Balance. An 8Gb IC currently costs $3.364, so buying 8GB of memory on the spot market would cost around $27.
Of course, the major add-in board manufacturers have long-term supply agreements with companies like Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, so they rarely buy from the spot market. Contract prices tend to differ positively from spot market prices (i.e. cheaper contract costs). Additionally, GPU vendors (AMD, Intel, Nvidia) support very specific DRAM ICs in their graphics processors, and the supported memory IC types are flashed into the firmware, so vendors can use any You can’t buy his GDDR6 chip.
Considering the spot price of GDDR6, a graphics board with 8GB of memory will cost at least $104 in early 2022. That’s a good amount. However, demand for graphics cards has steadily increased since Q2 2020 and peaked in Q1 2022, making $13 per 8Gb GDDR6 chip probably the highest price in years. The study of John Pedy.
Graphics card sales have trended downward since the first quarter of last year, as has demand for GDDR6 SGRAM and its spot price. Despite the drop in GDDR6 prices, both AMD and Nvidia have opted to pack 8GB of memory into their latest mid-range products, the RTX 4060 Ti and RX 7600. Nvidia is planning a 16GB version, but that won’t arrive until next month.
Consider that a $27 increase in bill of materials (BoM) can double the retail price. A 16GB card would then cost you an additional $54 (with some difference). Also, the IC prices above are for 8Gb ICs, but modern GPUs use 16Gb ICs (2GB each). This is needed to get 8GB with a 128 bit interface with just 4 chips. However, we assume that the price of 16Gb ICs will generally track the price of 8Gb ICs.
in the end, 16 GB of memory in an AIB can still be costlyEspecially if you want flexibility when it comes to pricing. While 8GB makes sense on sub-$300 cards like the upcoming RTX 4060 and RX 7600, it’s hard to get into significantly more expensive models.
There are other considerations as well. Adding memory chips to both sides of the graphics card PCB further complicates the design. Another thing to consider is that it was probably sometime in 2020 when AMD and Nvidia made a design decision about his Navi 33 and AD106/AD107 GPUs. At that time, the demand for graphics cards was increasing, and so was the price of GDDR6, so they opted for a 128-bit bus. This saves die space and made 8 GB of onboard memory the default configuration for these mid-range GPUs.
Since 2020, things have clearly changed a lot. GDDR6 and GDDR6X price cuts mean both AMD and Nvidia should be able to slightly lower the MSRPs of their Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 class products. . Alternatively, with the higher asking prices of the latest generation GPUs, doubling the VRAM should be a viable option as well. Unfortunately, outside of the upcoming RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, graphics cards with double the VRAM (two 16Gb chips per channel on each side of the PCB) are typically aimed at the more lucrative professional GPU market. Reserved.
