Anyone who has considered doing a new build with the latest Intel hardware knows that DDR5 is hard to find. Supply shortages have impacted manufacturers’ ability to produce enough to meet demands. Micron has stated in its latest earnings call that it expects supply for the highly sought-after memory to improve in 2022.
Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra said shortages should moderate in the first half of 2022, with DDR5 growing to meaningful levels in the second half. Shortages were “due to the PC production impact from ongoing non-memory component shortages and related customer inventory adjustments of DRAM and NAND products.” This shortage in part relates to a change in memory design, with DDR5 moving its power management integrated circuits (PMICs) off the motherboard and onto the memory PCB.
Increased Demand
Memory chip manufacturing has played a large role in the current GPU shortage. Aside from moving to newer generations, there is a move to 2 GB modules, such as in the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. The need for faster memory has grown in many other markets, further straining supply chains to support all products that use them.
- SSDs based on the PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 standards need faster NAND to support higher bandwidth.
- IoT sectors “saw more than 80 percent year-over-year revenue growth” largely from AI automated manufacturing, but also 40 percent growth in the consumer markets, mostly from VR and smart devices.
- Automotive and industry growth continues “to be the fastest-growing memory and storage markets over the next decade.”
- Mobile devices using LPDDR5X, as mobile phones transition from 4G to 5G.
PCs and Servers
Another challenge will be the split of supply to both the PC and marketplace. With both shifting over to DDR5, each will need their own supply in 2022.
So with respect to 2022, as the new processors that are able to use DDR5 gets rolled out into the marketplace, that will drive adoption of DDR5 in the server space as well. As we noted, in the PC space, DDR5 adoption has already started, and we have begun to shape the DDR5 product. DDR5 currently is in high demand.
Actually, supply there is limited for DDR5 in the industry. So when I look at PC as well as for server, we expect that DDR5 will be ramping up first in PC. And as the processors, with DDR5 new processors become available in the industry. We particularly see that ramping up later in calendar year ’22.
Sources: Seeking Alpha (via TechPowerUp), Micron