If the graphics card pricing problems of the past couple of years took a long time to come to an end, the DRAM cost issue has taken an age. DDR3 and DDR4 prices today are more than double what they were a few years ago and until very recently, that showed no sign of stopping. However, a new report suggests that by Christmas at least, DRAM prices might have started to come down to more reasonable levels.
Reports a few weeks ago suggested that a shortage of Intel CPUs could impact RAM prices as consumer demand falls towards the end of the year and this latest report from Trendforce's DRAMExchange division backs that up further.
"DRAMeXchange expects that the quotations of DRAM products to decline by 5 percent quarter-over quater, higher than the previous forecast of 1~3 percent. The weak quotations are mainly due to increasing bit supply yet fairly limited growth in demand, despite the coming of holiday sales season," DRAMeXchange said.
A five percent drop isn't exactly going to mean prices are cut in half, bringing DRAM prices back to where they should be for common capacities like 8GB, 16GB and 32GB kits, but it is a start at least. If we can get a few quarters with reduced demand, production may finally start to catch up with it, as new fabrication facilities producing the chips that go into popular memory modules are set to go on line in the next year.
The real impacter on this industry as of late though, has been smartphone sales. They haven't been as strong in recent months as in previous years though, so if we see a perfect storm of slowing demand of RAM chips, we may finally get the costs down to reasonable levels sometime in 2019.
Fingers crossed.
Image source: собственная работа/ WikimediaM
