We continue to observe the DRAM market. During the 39th week nothing unexpected happened: the trends that started to appear about six weeks ago dominated: DDR SDRAM price was almost flat, while SDR SDRAM continued to fall down.

The reasons why SDR started to collapse, while DDR to rise this summer are quite clear and could have been predicted numerous months ago.

Transition to DDR SDRAM has been happening quite strangely. In late 2000 both AMD and VIA announced their DDR SDRAM supporting chipsets for the Socket A platform, however, due to relatively high price and no clear advantages in performance, SDR-supporting core-logic devices dominated in the first half of 2001. Although VIA Technologies announced their Apollo Pro 266 for the Pentium III and Celeron processors in September 2000, mainboards based on the mentioned core-logic devices were not popular at all. Since Intel remains to be the driving force of new technologies, the newer type of memory started to be more or less widely adopted only in the very late 2001 with the introduction of the i845D chipset. The original i845 core-logic appeared in August 2001 supported SDR SDRAM, was very cheap and extremely slow for the Pentium 4 processors. Due to pretty low price, it was quite popular on certain markets for more than two quarters from the very start. However, Intel recently stopped to supply its partners with this one and started to push their DDR-supporting products. We should also mention that now even low-end graphics cards, like those based on the RADEON VE or the GeForce4 MX420 utilise DDR memory instead of SDR in early 2002, when the GeForce2 MX400/200 were quite popular on the low-end markets. Generally, we can consider SDR to be obsolete now – such memory is not used in new personal computers that can be found on the market. Thus, SDR price is low, while DDR is in demand and its price becomes higher.

Let us take a look at what happened on the spot DRAM market on the 39th week:

DDR DRAM Spot Prices at DRAMeXchange / 39th Week
Item	Spot Price Avgerage	Daily Change	Weekly Average	Weekly Trend	Monthly Average	Monthly Trend
DDR333; 256Mb (32Mx8)	$6.81	Up 0.59%	$6.94	Down 1.87%	$7.20	Down 3.61%
DDR266; 256Mb (32Mx8)	$6.43	Up 0.46%	$6.37	Up 0.94%	$6.56	Down 2.90%
DDR266; 256Mb (16Mx16)	$6.80	Up 0.29%	$6.82	Down 0.29%	$7.02	Down 2.85%
DDR266; 128Mb (16Mx8)	$3.18	Up 1.92%	$3.08	Up 3.25%	$3.27	Down 5.81%
SDR DRAM Spot Prices at DRAMeXchange / 39th Week
Item	Spot Price Average	Daily Change	Weekly Average	Weekly Trend	Monthly Average	Monthly Trend
SDR133; 256Mb (16Mx16)	$2.48	Stable	$2.62	Down 5.34%	$3.20	Down 18.13%
SDR133; 256Mb (32Mx8)	$2.25	Up 0.58%	$2.26	Down 0.44%	$2.57	Down 12.06%
SDR133; 128Mb (16Mx8)	$1.58	Up 3.26%	$1.56	Up 1.28%	$1.65	Down 5.45%
SDR133; 128Mb (8Mx16)	$1.85	Stable	$1.86	Up 0.54%	$1.96	Down 5.10%

Frankly speaking, there are no interesting trends to mention. DDR costs have fallen down compared to the prices one month ago, however, several positions started to climb up last week and continued on Monday, the 30th of September. I can explain this easily: Intel prepares to roll out three new DDR-supporting chipsets on the 7th of October, as a result, memory prices can further grow up a bit. They should not go too high on the spot market, though. For the 40th week something like $7 per 256Mbit device or $3.5 per 128Mbit one on the average can be expected.

SDR SDRAM continued to decrease in price. Even despite of the fact that the chips are very cheap now, they still have space to fall in terms of pricing. I thought that SDR cost would stop to slide down on some point some time ago, now I have to doubt if we really see this “point”, it seems that SDR still can go down further.

Now, let us take a look at the contract prices for the second half of September:

DRAM Contract Prices at DRAMeXchange / September Second Half
Item	Highest Price	Trend	Lowest Price	Trend
DDR266; 256Mb	$7.00	Up 1.44%	$6.50	Up 2.36%
DDR266; 128Mb	$3.50	Stable	$3.30	Up 3.12%
SDR133; 256Mb	$4.25	Down 7.6%	$3.50	Down 12.50%
SDR133; 128Mb	$2.10	Down 8.69%	$1.65	Down 17.50%

As you may see, the price on DDR SDRAM continues to rise here little by little, while SDR collapses. All in all, DDR is likely to become more expensive in October, though, I do not think