by Anton Shilov
09/30/2002 | 07:14 AM
We continue to observe the DRAM market. During the 39th week nothing unexpected happened: the trends that started to appear about six weeks ago dominated: DDR SDRAM price was almost flat, while SDR SDRAM continued to fall down.
The reasons why SDR started to collapse, while DDR to rise this summer are quite clear and could have been predicted numerous months ago. <%BANNER[article]%>
Transition to DDR SDRAM has been happening quite strangely. In late 2000 both AMD and VIA announced their DDR SDRAM supporting chipsets for the Socket A platform, however, due to relatively high price and no clear advantages in performance, SDR-supporting core-logic devices dominated in the first half of 2001. Although VIA Technologies announced their Apollo Pro 266 for the Pentium III and Celeron processors in September 2000, mainboards based on the mentioned core-logic devices were not popular at all. Since Intel remains to be the driving force of new technologies, the newer type of memory started to be more or less widely adopted only in the very late 2001 with the introduction of the i845D chipset. The original i845 core-logic appeared in August 2001 supported SDR SDRAM, was very cheap and extremely slow for the Pentium 4 processors. Due to pretty low price, it was quite popular on certain markets for more than two quarters from the very start. However, Intel recently stopped to supply its partners with this one and started to push their DDR-supporting products. We should also mention that now even low-end graphics cards, like those based on the RADEON VE or the GeForce4 MX420 utilise DDR memory instead of SDR in early 2002, when the GeForce2 MX400/200 were quite popular on the low-end markets. Generally, we can consider SDR to be obsolete now – such memory is not used in new personal computers that can be found on the market. Thus, SDR price is low, while DDR is in demand and its price becomes higher.
Let us take a look at what happened on the spot DRAM market on the 39th week:
| DDR DRAM Spot Prices at DRAMeXchange / 39th Week | ||||||
| Item | Spot Price Avgerage | Daily Change | Weekly Average | Weekly Trend | Monthly Average | Monthly Trend |
| DDR333; 256Mb (32Mx8) | $6.81 | Up 0.59% | $6.94 | Down 1.87% | $7.20 | Down 3.61% |
| DDR266; 256Mb (32Mx8) | $6.43 | Up 0.46% | $6.37 | Up 0.94% | $6.56 | Down 2.90% |
| DDR266; 256Mb (16Mx16) | $6.80 | Up 0.29% | $6.82 | Down 0.29% | $7.02 | Down 2.85% |
| DDR266; 128Mb (16Mx8) | $3.18 | Up 1.92% | $3.08 | Up 3.25% | $3.27 | Down 5.81% |
| SDR DRAM Spot Prices at DRAMeXchange / 39th Week | ||||||
| Item | Spot Price Average | Daily Change | Weekly Average | Weekly Trend | Monthly Average | Monthly Trend |
| SDR133; 256Mb (16Mx16) | $2.48 | Stable | $2.62 | Down 5.34% | $3.20 | Down 18.13% |
| SDR133; 256Mb (32Mx8) | $2.25 | Up 0.58% | $2.26 | Down 0.44% | $2.57 | Down 12.06% |
| SDR133; 128Mb (16Mx8) | $1.58 | Up 3.26% | $1.56 | Up 1.28% | $1.65 | Down 5.45% |
| SDR133; 128Mb (8Mx16) | $1.85 | Stable | $1.86 | Up 0.54% | $1.96 | Down 5.10% |
SDR SDRAM continued to decrease in price. Even despite of the fact that the chips are very cheap now, they still have space to fall in terms of pricing. I thought that SDR cost would stop to slide down on some point some time ago, now I have to doubt if we really see this “point”, it seems that SDR still can go down further.
Now, let us take a look at the contract prices for the second half of September:
| DRAM Contract Prices at DRAMeXchange / September Second Half | ||||
| Item | Highest Price | Trend | Lowest Price | Trend |
| DDR266; 256Mb | $7.00 | Up 1.44% | $6.50 | Up 2.36% |
| DDR266; 128Mb | $3.50 | Stable | $3.30 | Up 3.12% |
| SDR133; 256Mb | $4.25 | Down 7.6% | $3.50 | Down 12.50% |
| SDR133; 128Mb | $2.10 | Down 8.69% | $1.65 | Down 17.50% |