All manufacturers are jumping on the DDR5 bandwagon, although some are more advanced than others, of course. The changes are not minor, but rather extensive and the concept of manufacturing and especially of energy delivery is completely new. Therefore, the improvements in speed and bandwidth will be charged by manufacturers at a gold price, at least that is what is expected according to the first price report.
DDR4 will remain in force, the price of DDR5 memory will be prohibitive
According to TrendForce and its first market analysis for this new type of memory, we are talking about a product that is going to be the subject of very few pockets at this time. And it is that the company stipulates that the price of the DDR5 will be, at least, 30% higher than DDR4.
This is not a surprise in itself, since we assumed that the cost of this new memory would be higher up front, something that has already happened with the corresponding technological leaps between DDR1, DDR2, DDR3 and DDR4. It will not be different except for the aforementioned figure.
The price increase is such that the weak demand that may occur is expected not to exceed the almost non-existent supply of modules when Intel Alder Lake lands on the market. Because we do not think that there will be a great avalanche of modules and kits available, at all, to the point that none of the large manufacturers loose garment with this.
The modules will be at “moderate” speeds, where it is normal for them to reach DDR5-4800 and the most advanced to DDR5-6400, although there is news about some faster ones, which remains to be seen if they reach the market in time.
A momentary delay for the industry and especially for laptops
The chosen platform will undoubtedly be Alder Lake and its CPUs, but although it is the spearhead of Intel, the reality is that, given the prices that the processors will have, it is more than likely that sales will be scarce. The price of DDR5 is not going to help, so we could be facing a collapse of the expansion of this memory until the manufacturers do not reduce its cost.
The most affected sector will be that of laptops, because the cost is unfeasible to sell units with prices that are through the roof thanks to speculation and the graphics card market. Adding an extra cost to improve performance a little is not a very successful plan, so Intel and AMD plan the jump for 2023, surely late except for surprise in events.
Although the market is going to reduce the prices of the modules according to the last report we saw, the problem is that said report did not include the launch of DDR5 because the signed contracts are based on chips with sizes adapted to DDR4. Remember that with the new memory densities of up to 8 GB per chip have been reached, something unfeasible right now.
Therefore, if you were thinking of making the leap to the new Intel CPUs with DDR5, you are going to pay more until the industry adopts this new type of RAM.
