Computex 2006: 300W GPUs, Conroe, HDMI Video Cards and Lots of Motherboards

The Memory Market

The memory manufacturers we’ve spoken to are ecstatic about AMD’s move to DDR2, as they can begin moving away from DDR. 

While DDR shipments still outnumber DDR2 shipments, the shift is definitely taking place.  Right now there is a price parity between DDR-400 devices and DDR2-667 devices; combined with AMD’s move to Socket-AM2 and the conditions are ripe for a serious transition over to DDR2 in the market.  If Conroe ends up being as popular as everyone is expecting it to, the number of DDR2 platforms will continue to increase as will the demand for DDR2 memory. 

The breakdown of DDR2 shipments is particularly interesting, with the majority of modules still being DDR2-533.  Now that the price difference between DDR2-533 and DDR2-667 has gone down tremendously, we will see the balance shift more towards the latter. 

Unfortunately DDR2-800 is still extremely expensive compared to DDR2-667, because of extremely poor yields.  One source told us that DDR2-800 was yielding far below 50%, resulting in anywhere from a 30% to 100% premium over DDR2-667.  Everyone expects the yields on DDR2-800 to increase tremendously later this year, which will help drive DDR2-800 prices down as well as increase the number of low latency or higher bandwidth DDR2-800 parts. 

Samsung has been talking to its partners about the move to DDR3; by the end of this year Samsung is supposed to be sampling DDR3 modules, but the memory makers we spoke to believe that the schedule is too aggressive. 

Currently on Samsung’s roadmaps we’ve got DDR3-800, 1066 and 1333, but things could very well change by the time DDR3 actually makes its introduction on the desktop.  The memory makers we spoke to expect to see the beginning of a transition to DDR3 by the end of 2007 at the earliest, which seems plausible.