- The spot price of a 16 GB DDR4 chip fell by 5%
- This is the first time this price has fallen in over a year.
- While this is obviously a good thing, there are still plenty of storms to weather with the AMR crisis.
We’ve seen another indication that the RAM crisis is easing – at least a little – as well as an interesting move by the Korean government to try to protect consumers from the worst excesses of rising PC component prices.
Tom’s Hardware pointed to a report from DigiTimes that the spot price of a 16GB DDR4 chip has fallen about 5% over the past month.
That might not sound like much, but it’s notable because it’s the first monthly price drop for DDR4 in just over a year. (Although recently some increases have been minimal, with prices remaining effectively stable – but we haven’t seen a decline so far).
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Don’t get carried away with optimism, though, as this happened against the backdrop of a 2,200% increase in the cost of a 16GB DDR4 module over the past year.
Tom’s Hardware has also noticed another development in Asia, with what could be a significant move for Korean consumers – with perhaps the hope that other countries could adopt similar policies.
According to a report from the Korea Herald, the government will reuse more computers that it decommissioned last year, increasing the number of those computers that will be reused and donated to various organizations. It will also provide more computers to vulnerable groups, we are told, and expand the reach of a grant program that provides money to low-income households who buy computers for students.
All of this is designed to mitigate some of the impact of PCs becoming much more expensive, and there’s something else that’s also more telling. Another report from No Cut News talks about the Korean government’s plans to “monitor distribution as well as supply and demand conditions in the PC and laptop markets to avoid unfair practices.”
This apparently involves a few government agencies – including the Commerce Department – closely monitoring the PC market, as well as RAM sales, looking into what could be considered illegal activity. “Strict measures” are promised if component or PC sellers are found engaged in opportunistic profit-making activities.
This should help keep prices somewhat low, or at least that’s the theory, although these aren’t official announcements, just reports in Korean media at this point.
Analysis: encouraging signs – but let’s temper any optimism
We’ve recently seen reports of falling DDR5 prices around the world, most notably in China, where the price of cutting-edge 16GB RAM modules has fallen by as much as 30% (in terms of sales on the country’s e-commerce platforms). Seeing DDR4 also drop is of course welcome, even if not to the same degree.
So we can hope for some drop in DDR4 retail prices, although that wouldn’t really be a surprise, given the heartbreaking price spikes that this RAM and DDR5 have reached. As I observed in my previous article on falling DDR5 prices, there comes a point when prices become so high that a growing number of consumers simply refuse to pay them – and when this results in a drop in demand, a price correction inevitably follows.
There are other possible reasons for these drops as well, including theories that OpenAI has significantly reduced its RAM consumption ambitions, leaving demand for AI less intense than it previously appeared. Additionally, along the same lines, we have Google’s TurboQuant. This technology aims to significantly reduce AI memory usage – at least in some ways – although I think it’s a bit of a red herring, and I have a feature ready for release explaining why. (Watch out for this imminently).
Any relief we’re seeing now is certainly welcome, but don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re close to some sort of complete turning point when it comes to RAM pricing. Many analyst firms are betting heavily against this, and for good reason, and hardware makers are also singing the same thing. Don’t underestimate the challenges the tech world faces here.
Given the severity of these pricing issues, can we expect governments around the world to intervene as Korea appears to have done? I very much doubt we’ll see any big plans to control PC or component pricing fairness, which is a very thorny area to even consider. However, programs aimed at helping low-income students or families buy a laptop – or repurpose old PCs like Windows 10 – certainly seem like avenues to explore, or develop, that have a lot of potential.
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