Posted by inigyou 22 hours ago
Besides the AI craze, to me it sounds kinda reasonable. Most large buyers (apple, public clouds, OEMs) do forecasting and orders in advance, right?
Not sure if that's what you've meant...
I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something.
To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs that were producing legacy DDR4 are still producing it, just selling it higher and surfing on the consumer price increase of DDR5. As DDR5 became more expensive, people looked to build old AM4 PCs with the older memory, and the market just raised the price so that option would also cost more. IMHO DDR4 price increase has nothing to do with production.
I built a new gaming PC with DDR4 two months ago and it's pretty great. For servers RAM speed usually matters even less.
There shouldn't be much issue converting those 16nm DDR4 fabs to DDR5, it's really just an issue of swapping out the masks. That's assuming they haven't all already been converted years ago.
Even when there isn't an overlap, moving to the next process node usually isn't so much about replacing machines, but adding more machines. To oversimplify, you might not be able to convert one older DDR4 fab to DDR5, but sometimes you might be able to convert two older DDR4 fabs to one DDR5 fab.
Such conversions might not be the most cost-effective option in the long run (that unmodified fab could have kept selling DDR4 for years), but conversions might be significantly faster than building new fabs.
Like everything related to it being a clean room; All the logistics robots which move wafers around; All the machines that deposit layers of material like CVD/AVD/Sputtering; The various machines that do the actual etching; The furnaces; The inspection and quality control equipment;
Also, absolutely everything to do with dicing and packaging. But that's usually already at another factory (often a completely different company) due to how process agnostic it is. Same applies to growing and prepping the silicon wafer.
I'm posting this from a machine that uses DDR3 and is still perfectly capable of meeting my needs.
Nothing prevents wholesalers from selling their memory or memory futures at a loss, as that is a risk that is justified by equal possibiltiy of the memory appreciating in excess of inflation.
https://www.polygon.com/ram-manufacturers-sued-supply-price-...
SK Hynix's suppliers are also under investigation for anti-trust behavior in South Korea.
https://en.sedaily.com/society/2026/05/29/prosecutors-raid-s...
Game: Just buy up all the RAM...