Current consumer laptop and desktop computers use DDR5 memory.As other manufacturers shift their focus to newer products, the Chinese are making more of the older stuff, and selling it cheaper. Perhaps this will help bring consumer memory prices down sooner than expected.
See here.
Since CPUs are already bottlenecked by memory bandwidth more than anything else, it is difficult to know what to do with DDR4 except sell it on eBay to pair with recycled servers for home labs. That's a pretty niche market made only possible because typical home labs are powered off so much of the time that energy efficiency is not important.
On the other hand, there are lots of non-consumer devices that still rely on DDR4, for example a Pi 5. If the price of a Pi could return to pre-apocalypse levels, that would be nice.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Mon Feb 23, 2026 5:43 am