If graphics cards are a drama, DDR 5 RAM wasn’t going to be less, and that’s what we’ve seen for a month and a half to think about and a lot. Availability is fair or nonexistent, there is no stock and the prices are sky-high, but if there isn’t too much of a difference in NAND Flash technology and they drop in price … are memories worth that much? Well, because there is one culprit, the PMIC, but is it enough to blame it for the high price of DDR5?
No one doubts the performance of Intel Core 12 processors anymore, its IPC is the best ever, the Alder Lake architecture is totally revolutionary and logically AMD feels the pressure for all this and for two other features: the inclusion of DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.
It is already known on the second that it increases the cost of the motherboard by a few dollars, but the memory is speculated at a fairly high level because, unlike GPUs, its components are much smaller.
The high price of DDR5, higher than GPUs?
Proportionally speaking of course. The price of DDR5 memory is higher than that of a GPU although they do not have MSRP as such, but one only has to see the fall of DDR4 to understand that the novelty cannot justify the ‘existing mismatch, but there is some light after that as we have commented and everything is mostly PMIC focused.
We will soon be launching an exclusive article on this component which is not only included in DDR5 RAMs, but basically and so that we can all understand what we are going to comment on, we are talking about a chip (in this case) that is responsible for energy control. What is going on? That in itself is a novelty in DDR5, since DDR4 included all PMICs on the motherboard, whereas now the distribution of these is done from the module itself and the card manages the other voltages and adjacent controllers.
A high precision controller
The problem is that PMICs run at very low voltages, very quickly and with very precise control, which makes them expensive to manufacture and logically, since there is no stock of DDR5, they have become more expensive. because there is a lot of demand and little to offer. Its price would be 10 times more expensive than what is used on the boards to control voltage and amperage than DDR4.
The demand is such that their availability has increased to 35 weeks, that is to say that it takes nearly 9 months between ordering, assembly, distribution and sale, so the modules that came out do not have more than 6 months on the manufacturers’ shelves.
In addition, it is assumed that DDR5 capacitors and their PMICs could also become shortages, as the demand is such that with GPUs and motherboards there is not enough to produce. In short, it will take months to replenish the entire supply and we will surely hit the middle of the year and it will not be a common situation like the one we are experiencing today in DDR4, despite the fact that there is reports that the high price of DDR5 will be reduced from the first quarter.
