If graphics cards are a drama, DDR 5 RAM memories were not going to be less, and that is what we have seen for a month and a half to think about and a lot. The availability is fair or none at all, there is no stock and prices are through the roof, but if there is not too much difference in NAND Flash as technology and they are falling in price … How are memories worth so much? Well, because there is a culprit, the PMIC, but is it enough to blame him for the high price of DDR5?
No one doubts the performance of Intel Core 12 CPUs anymore, its IPC is the best ever seen, the Alder Lake architecture is totally revolutionary and logically AMD is feeling the pressure for all this and for two more features: the inclusion of DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.
We already know about the second that it increases the cost of the motherboard by a few dollars, but memory is being 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 you only have to see the fall of DDR4 to understand that the novelty cannot justify the existing mismatch, but there is some light after this as we have commented and everything is mainly focused on the PMIC.
We will launch an exclusive article shortly about this component that is not only included in DDR5 RAM memories, but roughly 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 control energy. What happen? That this in itself is a novelty in the DDR5, since the DDR4 included all the PMICs on the motherboard, while now the distribution of them is done from the module itself and the board manages other voltages and adjacent controllers.
A high precision controller
The problem is that PMICs work with 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 offer. Its price is reportedly 10 times more expensive than what is used on boards to control voltage and amperage than DDR4.
The demand is such that their availability has increased to 35 weeks, that is, it takes almost 9 months between the order, the assembly, the distribution and the sale, so the modules that have come out have no more than 6 months on the shelves of the manufacturers.
In addition, it is speculated that the DDR5 capacitors and their PMIC could also become shortages, since the demand is such that together with the GPUs and motherboards there is not enough to produce. In short, it will take months to resupply all the supply and we will surely reach the middle of the year and it will not be a common situation like the one we experience in DDR4 today, despite the fact that there are reports that the high price of DDR5 will be reduced from of the first trimester.
