Post #3482541

2026-06-23 02:25 UTC

The last time we saw a price spike like this was when the Chinese adhesives factory caught fire and burned to the ground, those adhesives were used in all kinds of chips. 2013 - but even then it wasn’t this bad. theguardian.com/…/china-fire-memory-chip-prices There were also supply chain problems during Covid. 2020-2023: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S2405896322017293

Replies (2)

@tal@lemmy.today 2026-06-23 03:06

Well…but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn’t asking about the spike, but about the absolute price. PC Part Picker’s memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org’s Wayback Engine. First of all, here’s a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB: So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB. They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it’s probably never been that expensive. However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive. If we look at DDR4: DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it’s come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190. Inflation-adjusted, that’s $144 in 2019 dollars. It looks like that was about April 2019.

Open ##3482540
@MangoCats@feddit.it 2026-06-23 02:38

That’s what I was thinking: early COVID, and it’s not so much about the price spike relative to where it was, but the absolute dollars per GB pricing which has been persistently falling for decades - I doubt you have to go past 2021 to get to higher prices per GB, and that was for slower speeds too…

Open ##3484469