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DDR5 RAM prices crashed by 20% in May
- AdrianB1 4y agoBad title. Dropping from extremely expensive to very expensive is NOT crashing. It is still a lot more expensive than DDR4 with no matching performance gains, so it is a false statement. Luna was a crash, not a 20% price reduction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yieldcrv 4y agoA) commentary on price trends are always hyperbolic B) outside of crypto assets, 20% downwards in a month is a crash in every asset class
- ALittleLight 4y agoRAM is an asset class?
- bozhark 4y agoPhysical asset
- rembicilious 4y agoIt’s definitely not an asset. It’s near practically a consumable. It will degrade with use, and over time. It will not maintain it’s current value, let alone increase in value.
- arthurcolle 4y ago'Semiconductors' is a sector and it is probably appropriate to consider them as a commodity but no certainly not it's own asset class. The asset class you are looking for is 'commodities', old sport.
- Sholmesy 4y agoIt's certainly a commodity right? (at least the RAM chips that get put on modules), and commodities are certainly an asset class?
- whateveracct 4y agoThis is just the financialization of the American mind
- baq 4y agoCalls on the American mind, please
- Dylan16807 4y ago> outside of crypto assets, 20% downwards in a month is a crash in every asset class When a product in demand moves from prototype into mass production, the price drops rapidly. That isn't a crash. The expected price is to get close to DDR4.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> commentary on price trends are always hyperbolic for example, many financial publications will write the exact same thing for a 2% intraday price movement there is nothing to explain or rationalize or correct, its hyperbole I think its interesting, to know about prototyping to mass production, but is or isn't a crash? okay. shrug. its a waste of time to split hairs over that, its hyperbole.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> its a waste of time to split hairs over that, its hyperbole. It's fine that you don't care about the difference, but for people that aren't particularly in touch with the computer components market it's very useful to point out the difference between a stable price plummeting below the norm and a brand new price plummeting toward the norm.
- yieldcrv 4y agoYes, good context In the context of semiconductors, isnt everything inflated and would plummet toward a historical norm with little regard to newness? for now
- Dylan16807 4y agoEverything's a bit inflated right now but we're most of the way back to normal for consumer computing parts.
- goldcd 4y agoB - Memory is a 'class of product', DDRx is just the model. A few people will buy the 2022 Ford-Model-X for a premium at launch, but once they've bought it, Ford are just selling to the people with a 2010 Ford who just want to upgrade to what's in the new catalogue. I'm sure some of those upgraders will pick up a bargain on that onsold 2020 stock - but Ford aren't devoting resources to keep making those old models.
- quickthrower2 4y agoIt is a commodity though. If oranges drop from $5/kg to $4/kg I am not calling it a crash.
- yieldcrv 4y agothe futures traders will
- Dylan16807 4y agoIf anyone was trading futures on DDR5 the price would be even lower than this level, because that's how the price always works on new types of memory.
- GiorgioG 4y agoDDR5 makes no sense today at these prices. AMD is going to be in a tough position in the fall with DDR5-only support in their new chipsets/CPUs. My next rig may be an 13th-gen Intel if DDR5 prices don't come down to DDR4 levels (given that DDR5 isn't any faster than DDR4.)
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoThat may be true in the short term, but comparable Intel processors actually cost a lot more because the motherboards are more expensive and power consumption over time will make the less power efficient Intel CPU much more expensive than AMD.
- wtallis 4y agoIn terms of power consumption, I think that will heavily depend on usage patterns. AMD desktop processors currently have really bad idle power because of the chiplet-based design with an outdated 14nm IO die. So if a machine spends most of its time idle or mostly-idle, its long-term energy usage (and thus operating cost) could easily be higher with AMD than with an Intel processor that has excessive peak power draw but better idle power management. (Are there any business-oriented AMD desktop PCs with Energy Star or similar certifications, or are those regulations too loose to matter here?)
- dralley 4y agoZen 4 will have a 6nm I/O die from TSMC, power usage ought to be lower.
- wtallis 4y agoThat new IO die is by far the most important and interesting thing about their upcoming generation. Basic graphics capability as a universal feature, hopefully better idle power, DDR5 and PCIe gen5, while the compute chiplets will seemingly be getting fairly modest performance improvements.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoIs there any speculation as to what is causing the drop?
- goldcd 4y agoI'd guess supply outstripping demand - but am open to suggestions from those understanding what the stars are currently doing.
- dehrmann 4y agoThe standard explanation for almost everything right now is everyone in the supply chain ordered more than they needed, it caused a supply crunch, but now warehouses are full, and suppliers either caught up in production, or people don't want to be stuck with too much old product in their warehouses.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drumhead 4y agoProbably everyone anticipating a recession and holding off on ordering anymore until they get a clearer idea of whats going happen.
- dspillett 4y agoThe graphics card bubble seems to be reducing, chip shortages affecting other components may be reducing the need to upgrade RAM¹ both for personal and commercial users, and a general drop in demand because of recent cost of living increases² in many places. Furthermore RAM prices generally may have been kept higher in the last two years due to demand from companies and individuals buying or upgrading kit for home working. Even without the migration of many workers back to offices that extra demand would be rapidly cooling off anyway, as those upgrades and new purchases are³ not part of a regular pattern, so this may be an expected correction. On top of that the tech is no longer as new: production costs will be dropping as processes are refined and output numbers increase. Though I suspect the current drop is more a demand-side thing for several reasons including the above. Also: early pioneers have been scalped already, the next tranche of buyers may not bite until there is this sort of price drop. [1] why bother if other parts of your system won't keep up well enough for you to see the benefit? [2] fuel, food, interest rates rising in some countries affects those with a mortgage, et cacas: fancy tech is a luxury, people may put off such purchases until the costs of essentials settle a bit [3] hopefully!
- wnevets 4y agoBleeding edge tech usually starts off very expensive and tends to get cheaper as the manufacturing capacity increases, hardly news worthy.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoEven if this was generally predictable, the exact timing may not be. I was glad for the information.
- hardware2win 4y agoArent Intel Optane bleeding edge?
- tzs 4y ago...and then, at least with RAM in my experience, after that it gets expensive again when no new computers have used that particular RAM for a few years.
- hinkley 4y agoQuality Control and payback periods are two situations where this becomes very obvious if you think about it, but is not obvious to most comsumers. When you get the factory working well enough that you make a gross profit, you can scale up. The. You reduce waste over time by making little tweaks, and your margins go up a little. But then you need to pay off the equipment, and the research costs, and nobody wants to taper that off in a long tail because what’s the point in making a product you make no money on the entire time, or leaving yourself open for the competition introducing a new product you can’t compete with because you don’t have money saved up for R&D? So you pay off your loans and refill your war chest and everything after that is gravy. If you’re the first in your industry to get there, you can turn the crews on the competition by lowering your prices first. Or don’t and get sued for price fixing. Dropping the price by 3% isn’t going to get anyone to take a chance on your product instead of someone else’s. You’ve got to do something more dramatic than that. And then you might find out you’re not the first, because everyone else happily matches or exceeds your price drop.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoIt's newsworthy if you were on the fence waiting for a decent price drop.
- scrlk 4y agoFor comparison, here's an Anandtech article from 2015 talking about falling DDR4 prices at roughly the same point in the adoption cycle: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9864/price-of-ddr4-memory-drops-nearly-40-in-six-months-and-will-keep-declining https://www.anandtech.com/show/9864/price-of-ddr4-memory-dro...
- Havoc 4y agoInteresting to see a 24gb option. Was thinking for my next build 32 seems a little thin but 64 too much. 48 would be a neat compromise
- gameswithgo 4y ago32 is thin only if you have highly specialized workload. Its enough for all games and even pretty hardcore software development.
- cheald 4y agoI'm running 48 (2x16 , 2x8, all Corsair Vengeance C16). Each pair of DIMMs shares a channel. Works great.
- zamadatix 4y agoDoesn't it halve the throughput to mix channel sizes like that?
- cheald 4y agoAs pointed out, each channel is 24GB (16+8), so it's running dual channel happy as a clam.
- wmf 4y agoIf you install it right, you're not mixing channels. 24 on one and 24 on the other.
- zamadatix 4y agoInteresting, this is the coolest thing I've learned this week! It looks like there are even situations 3 DIMMs can meet the criteria for dual channel operation https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005657/boards-and-kits.html?wapkw=flex#flex https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
- arvinsim 4y ago
- lvl102 4y agoI think these hardware manufacturers figured out that they can just keep prices high. Memories and SSD manufacturers especially.
- dharmab 4y agoHere is a months old LTT video predicting this cycle: https://youtu.be/aJEq7H4Wf6U https://youtu.be/aJEq7H4Wf6U
- yakubin 4y agoIs it normal to call a price drop a "crash", even when not talking about stocks? The title and phrases like "DDR4 memory has also suffered price drops" make it sound as if something terrible happened. Or is it just me?
- vikingerik 4y agoIt's clickbait. "Crash" and "suffer" get more clicks than "lower". Yes, human psychology is that shallow and manipulable.
- wtallis 4y agoI wouldn't call it a crash unless there was a severe enough oversupply that some suppliers were in financial trouble. The DDR5 situation is far from an oversupply; it's just a severe shortage easing as the market starts to mature and achieve a semi-reasonable equilibrium.
- ksec 4y agoAnd that is a problem. I am even thinking if I should flag it.
- mrits 4y agoIt's hardly even a sale.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fomine3 4y agoAgree. This is just a price drop from the expensive initial price.
- Thorentis 4y agoAnd here I am still rocking DDR3 on third gen Intel hardware with no complaints!
- userbinator 4y agoPre-Rowhammer DRAM is hard to find now.
- skunkworker 4y agoI was this way until late last year, I had an overclocked i5-3570k with 32gb of DDR3. But I bit the bullet and went to a 5900x, I didn’t realize how cpu limited I was at the time though on games and programs. But it lasted for 7 years and I put off upgrading until I could get roughly 2x single core performance.
- seiferteric 4y agoI am still on a i7-3770 & 16GB of ram on my desktop and until about a year ago I still though it was okay, but I have really been noticing it's limitations now with my M1 mac. Could possibly be do to meltdown/spectre patches in the kernel as well, looking forward to Zen 4!
- Thorentis 4y agoI've considered upgrading each year for the past 3 or 4 years but each time I check prices I can never justify the cost. Given that 90% of my computer use is now on a work issued Macbook pro, I can't really justify spending 2-3k on a desktop upgrade if my current setup works fine for coding, very occasional gaming and multimedia consumption.
- baq 4y agoThought the same on 4th gen, but figured the box is becoming a bit old and upgraded out of curiosity to 12th. Holy crap the thing flies and the cooler barely spins on idle, if at all.
- Linda703 4y ago[dead]
- PebblesHD 4y agoGlad to see DDR5 heading for more mainstream pricing. When I built a new machine to replace my well aged 4th gen, I was pleasantly surprised the 12th gen Intels supported both, so I’ve used nice high capacity DDR4 while prices come down, and in a year or two I’ll look at upgrading the motherboard and RAM to DDR5 and throw the older stuff into the NAS.
- hencoappel 4y agoThe cost of a new mobo and RAM can't be worth it for the minimal improvements surely?
- gsnedders 4y agoIt's very much workload dependent: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2894?vs=2892 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2894?vs=2892
- danuker 4y agoDepends what you do with it. If you run VM servers, it might be well worth it.
- leaflets2 4y agoPersonally I'm looking for 64 GB for a work laptop, lots of VMs yes So frustrating that max installable RAM usually isn't listed in the specs
- sjcoles 4y ago11th Gen+ Intel all support 64gb+ of RAM. If the laptop mobo supports 32gb dimms is another question all together.
- Out_of_Characte 4y agoThats because maximum capacity is determined by the CPU and the amount of slots available. Just like a phone I bought years ago only listed a maximum micro-sd capacity of 32GiB even though the right formatting would allow 64 or 128. albeit being 'more wastefull' as the adress space didn't increase.
- Animats 4y agoAlthough currently in well-known stores like Amazon, over 3,000 different kits of DDR4 RAM are on sale and only 213 of DDR5 memory. Of which, what fraction are counterfeit, floor sweepings, rejects, or stolen? That's too many resellers.
- zamadatix 4y agoI hope pricing keep going down for this Fall. Whether it be AMD or Intel for me this upcoming generation it's looking like the high end options will remain very memory starved when it comes to multi-core workloads due to the core counts and DDR5 helps with that.
- lynguist 4y agoDoes any brand at all sell ECC UDIMM DDR5 modules? I want to use it for an Alder Lake workstation, but can’t seem to find any except for Dell OEM memory. Is there none on the “open” market?
- hda2 4y agoI was under the impression that all DDR5 modules have ECC in them, but only "ECC" modules reported errors to the OS. Wouldn't normal DDR5 be sufficient for your workstation?
- Dylan16807 4y agoThe internal ECC is useful but a separate feature. Traditional ECC, achieved by adding extra storage, is still available and will also protect the data as it's sent across the bus. Sadly it now requires 25% extra chips instead of 12.5% extra chips, because of DIMMs being split into two subchannels. Also sadly there's no way to generate a bus-level checksum on the fly. I don't know if internal ECC errors ever get reported.
- lynguist 4y agoSo what happened is the following: When JEDEC was standardizing DDR5 they mandated on-die ECC which checks for errors that happen while the data rests on RAM. This was done to increase reliability because of high memory density. This is good and every DDR5 module has it. However there’s another ECC: the one where errors are checked each time data is transferred between CPU and RAM. This requires the support of the CPU, the RAM, and the mainboard. This is important for data integrity and every computer that runs for multi-day periods must have it. I’ve found by reading papers about it that 1 bit error per 4 GB RAM per 3 days is guaranteed to happen. If RAM is marked DDR5 it has on-die ECC. If RAM is marked DDR5 ECC it has on-die and transfer ECC. That is what I want and it is not optional at all in my opinion.
- DeathArrow 4y ago>I’ve found by reading papers about it that 1 bit error per 4 GB RAM per 3 So for my 64GB of RAM I get 2 bytes worth of errors / day. And a few hundred for 2 or 3 months since I didn't restart my PC.
- mkl95 4y agoWell, that explains why the 32GB RAM laptops I've been shopping for are suddenly cheaper. Time to buy I guess.
- dathinab 4y agoLess crashed and more like normalized.
- beebeepka 4y ago20% is hardly a crash but I expect retail prices be acceptable for Zen 5, say q3 2023. Good for this year's laptops and whoever decides to go with Zen 4
- zasdffaa 4y agoFrom that picture, what are VPP, BL and DFE?
- usr1106 4y agoVPP: http://www.learningaboutelectronics.com/Articles/What-is-peak-to-peak-voltage.php http://www.learningaboutelectronics.com/Articles/What-is-pea... BL and DFE are shortly on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM
- zasdffaa 4y agoWell that burst length looks like it's going to be good for bandwidth. Now, about DRAM latency... perhaps DDR6 can have an I WANTZ IT NAO signal.
- rvba 4y agoIs this the impact of Shanghai being clpsed for 2 months? No components out from Shanghai. No stuff in. So lots of companies not investing in new computers - because they have cash flow problems (cant finish goods to sell)?