TapTechNews May 13th news, according to Taiwan media Economic Daily News, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics will stop supplying DDR3 memory to the market in the second half of the year, driving the recent rise in DDR3DRAM prices, with the highest increase reaching 20 percent.
DDR3 has become a niche product and is still used in areas such as set-top boxes, Wi-Fi routers, switches, and monitors.
Taiwan media reported that Samsung Electronics has notified customers that it will stop supplying DDR3 at the end of this quarter; while SK Hynix completed the conversion of production capacity at its Wuxi wafer fab at the end of last year, gradually phasing out the manufacture of DDR3.
Another major DRAM memory manufacturer, Micron, although has not stopped production of DDR3 memory, has also significantly reduced its supply.
The reason why the three mainstream memory companies are abandoning the DDR3 memory market to varying degrees is mainly due to the strong demand for HBM3 and standard DDR5 recently, leaving no room for the relatively mature DDR3 products.
HBM, known as 'AI memory', speaks for itself. As for standard DDR5 memory, Intel and AMD will launch a new generation of mainstream desktop platforms in the second half of the year, which only support DDR5, bringing a new wave of demand.
At the same time, in the server side, Intel's upcoming Xeon 6 Series processors and AMD's EPYCTurin processors based on the Zen5 architecture are expected to be released within the year, both of which will drive server manufacturers to increase their DDR5 procurement.
Compared to DDR3, HBM and DDR5 memory have more advantages in terms of unit price and profit, no wonder the three major memory manufacturers are shifting their human resources, equipment, and production capacity out of the DDR3 field.
In addition to these three giants, Nanya Technology has currently shifted its main capacity to DDR4/5 memory, with DDR3 parts only accepting customer foundry orders.
According to TapTechNews survey, companies that still consider DDR3 memory as an important business include ZTE and Macronix.
Reports estimate that the price of DDR3 memory will continue to rise in the second half of the year, with the possibility of further increase in the price hike.