According to some Taiwanese sources, it was in February and then in the beginning of March that VIA started undertaking serious measures aimed at reducing the prices of DDR SDRAM modules.
We don’t know if it is only VIA, which is “to blame” for that, but the fact is undeniable: the minimal price for the 128MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM module now makes $53 (according to Pricewatch), which is quite a big drop anyway. Well, it seems we may be happy about it, doesn’t it? In fact, the situation is twofold. The customers are quite happy that’s true, but the memory makers… are simply horrified! They lost almost the last source for revenues. As a result, VIA appeared a scapegoat accused of making the DDR prices crash down.
As it turned out, the mainboard manufacturers could order not one PC2100 DDR SDRAM module together with a chipset (VIA Apollo Pro266 or KT266) but three, or even five modules. As a result, the gray market started offering extremely cheap DDR memory modules (it could make only $50 together with a chipset). As the memory manufacturers suppose, this was the first push to the overall DDR memory price drop.
In fact, VIA tries to make up for their fault claiming that there were only 50,000 modules sold with the chipset in March (which doesn’t exceed 10% of the entire 128MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM modules shipments in March) and that they couldn’t exert any serious influence over the memory prices. Maybe, who knows. However, the cost of these memory modules (a bit over $50) is very similar to the cost of those DIMM sold together with VIA chipsets ($50), don’t you think so?
Anyway, we can’t deny that VIA did influence the DDR memory pricing, since it was VIA, which pushed forward the entire thing. And we should thank the company for that, actually. If it were not for VIA the situation could hardly ever change: the mainboard manufacturers wouldn’t produce DDR mainboards because of the small amounts of DDR memory available in the market while the memory manufacturers wouldn’t increase the production of DDR memory modules because of the very few mainboards supporting DDR memory selling. And now the exclusive circle is torn!