DDR2 Prices Go Up, DDR3 Goes Mainstream

The DDR2 memory industry has been struggling on the bottom of the pit for more than one year due to the market being oversaturated. Many memory producers had to take drastic measures to keep themselves alive, including selling their production under the manufacturing costs or temporarily shutting down their business to avoid overstock.

According to the Taiwanese DRAMeXchange, a market research company that monitors the DRAM industry, the price of DDR2 memory is back on track again, and is slowly, yet constantly increasing. While at the beginning of 2007, memory manufacturers sold their 512 MB DRAM chips for around $6 per unit, in early December, the same chips would sell for around $0.94 each.

This week, the prices gave slowly increased to between $1.00 and $1.20. The price of larger, 1Gb memory increased to over $2 each, which means that memory cards manufacturers will spend between $16.80 and $19.20 for 1 GB module.

The absolute newcomer on the market, the "young" DDR3 memory has not been widely adopted so far, because there are not enough motherboards brands to have implemented it already. Moreover, since it is an absolute novelty, its price has been kept high on purpose. Still, Intel and some DRAM manufacturers are aggressively pushing it forward in order to ramp production and be able to cut the manufacturing costs.

Should that succeed, the DDR3 memory prices will be trimmed down below the price of an average DDR2 memory chip. Various reports claim that Intel is trying to convince some PC manufacturers and OEM vendors to migrate to the new DDR3-based Intel platforms, in an attempt to shift the focus to the DDR3 standard. According to the same reports, almost 30 percent of the upcoming PC models will come with DDR3 memory modules in the last months of the year.