“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
Same memory production capacity can be allocated to ddr5 or to hbm and openai signed contracts with sk hynix and samsung, the two largest ram manufacturers in the world, and bought a significant percentage of next year’s production.
DDR5 prices started spiking as that deals impact propagated through the supply chain. I bought a 2x32 6800 Cl30 kit for 195 euro 12 days ago. It was 330 euro 4 days later.
…Is it that interchangeable?
TBH I know little of memory fabs and HBM ICs, but I know (say) TSMC can’t just switch from a power-optimized process to a high frequency one at the drop of a hat.
Slightly different part, same process. The bigger bottleneck is packaging - HBM is 3d stacked.
Ah. Yeah. And its on the fab to do that.
I always though it’d be cool for CPUs to switch to packaged RAM, too. Samsung apparently tried to do it with Wide I/O for mobile ARM stuff, but it never caught on.