Competition from Chinese companies has considerably reduced the margins of the RAM giants.
Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory, or DDR5 SDRAM or, even more simply, DDR5, has been on the market for several years now, and we all know that it is gradually overtaking the previous technologies represented by DDR4 and, slightly older still, DDR3. However, these two generations have not yet completely disappeared from the computing landscape. It has to be said that their cost makes them still very interesting solutions in many sectors where the performance of DDR5 is not so useful.
However, it's this cost that could well hasten the end of DDR3 first, and then DDR4 relatively quickly. Several concordant sources explain, for example, that all the major American and South Korean manufacturers have begun to turn their backs on both types of memory, with production set to cease definitively before the end of 2025. The TechPowerUp website was one of the first to bring together these different sources to discuss the choice of Micron (USA), Samsung and SK Hynix (South Korea), which can no longer generate margins high enough to justify the production costs of these DDR3/DDR4.
Of course, the obsolescence of these types of memory makes them less attractive, but that's not the only reason, since, as we said at the start of this article, demand remains strong. No, the problem lies elsewhere... in China to be precise. Chinese RAM manufacturers are not yet in a position to compete with the DRAM giants in the DDR5 sector, which is still a little too technical, but DDR3/DDR4 production holds no secrets for them, and their manufacturing costs are so low that they are far too strong a competitor for Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, who can no longer keep up. Rather than cut their margins any further, they're turning to DDR5. But it's only a matter of time before the leading Chinese companies - Changxin Memory Technology and Fujian Jinhua - are in a position to offer DDR5.
