It is likely that to most of you it seems absurd that at this point we are talking about DDR3 memory when DDR4 RAM has already been established in the market for many years and, in fact, in the niche of. Desktop PC is by far the most used. However, DDR3 memory is still used in many of its variants in other types of devices on the market, so this price increase will cause the prices of other components to increase irreparably.
What is the impact of the increase in the price of DDR3 memory?
There are many devices that even in mid-2021 continue to use DDR3 memory: routers, smartphones, low-power PCs, tablets … the list of devices is very large, and even SSDs use DDR3 as their cache memory. Right now, manufacturers like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix have made the decision to stop making DDR3 memory chips to make room for DDR5, which means there will be a shortage of stock and that its price will skyrocket.
Only a few small Taiwanese manufacturers like Windbond Electronics, Jinghao Technology, and Etron will continue to produce DDR3 memory, but they will do so on a small scale as they obviously don’t have the manufacturing power of the big brands we mentioned earlier. This means that DDR3 memory will not go away, but it will be manufactured with a volume that is, predictably, too low for the demand still present in the market.
This price increase will affect us consumers more than expected, especially since its technology is already clearly outdated. Predictably, this will affect the price we pay for devices like routers, smartphones, SSDs, monitors and even in periféricos games which have built-in memory, so ultimately this is very bad news.
Why is this type of RAM not shut down?
Not everything in the hardware industry is PC related, and although in our computers we have stopped using this type of memory (at least the vast majority, because there are obviously still many users using PCs). old PCs that still use DDR3 RAM). doesn’t mean the industry has abandoned it.
This price increase will likely lead many manufacturers to decide to upgrade the chips they use in their devices from generation to generation to DDR4 or even DDR5, but there are also many who will prefer not to invest. money in the design change of their products. and stick to this type of memory even if it means having higher costs and therefore having to increase the price of your products.
In this industry, and especially when we talk about relatively small manufacturers, when they invest in design, they want to pay for it as long as possible, and for many of them, change the design to adopt new memory technology. may come at a cost that they cannot afford. Therefore, we will continue to see DDR3 devices for some time to come, which means their price will likely have to increase.