With the increasing penetration rate of Intel EMR and AMD Bergamo processor platforms supporting DDR5, the demand for DDR5 applications on servers has seen rapid growth this year. However, due to the crowding out effect of large-scale production of HBM on the original DRAM output, the supply of server DDR5 products was relatively tight, resulting in a significant increase in server DDR5 product prices since the beginning of this year. The cooling demand for general-purpose servers and the high inventory in various links of the industry chain, despite the original factory's reduction of server DDR4 output, still result in an oversupply of server DDR4 in the short term.
According to ChinaFlashMarket data, as of the end of September, the price difference between DDR5 64GB and DDR4 64GB was nearly 70%. Even though DDR5 has higher costs compared to DDR4 in terms of die size, power management chips, testing, and other aspects, such a significant price difference has made some enterprise customers, under enormous cost pressure, more inclined to choose cost-effective DDR4 products for some application scenarios with low performance requirements.
According to ChinaFlashMarket, various manufacturers have recently released prices for DDR5 in the fourth quarter. As supply gradually becomes sufficient, the increase has converged to single digits. However, the huge price difference between DDR5 and DDR4, as well as the trade-off between input-output ratio under high capital investment, have affected the motivation of some customers to promote DDR5 penetration.
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