By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
fallen on 27 November 2013
Edit Thread
SocialistSlayer said:
czecherychestnut said:
bonzobanana said:

What is apparent is that the ddr3 vs gddr5 tradeoff hasn't saved them a lot of money. $18 all up, which is removed due to the higher other costs, most likely due to the physically larger mobo, casing and higher small component count. They will probably benefit more from die shrinks than Sony however, though with ddr4 coming soon, ddr3 costs may start to rise in the future (they've gone up ~25% this year). Will be interesting to see what happens.

holy crap, really!?

so there's a good chance that since its becoming outdated, ddr3 ram may continue to increase in cost do to being legacy produced.

if true that's a bad break for microsoft, because it would seem gddr5 will decrease in cost as it gains more market share, and ddr3 will increase in cost due to it being a legacy product.

that may have a long lasting impact on the cost of both systems.

hopefully it doesnt continue to go up.


Nope, GDDR5 is vastly more expensive than DDR3 and the gap will actually grow in the future.

How much is being mass produced is not really a valid way of looking at it. You can manufactore one shoe and one million ipod, each ipods will still cost more to make than the shoe, fundamentally. It's the same, GDDR5 will always cost more to make than DDR3. Additionally, there will always be vastly more DDR3 produced, even as they both wind down (GDDR5 will be replaced by on-die stacked RAM soon)

 

Lets say 100 million DDR3 chips are produced now against 5 million GDDR5. In 5 years, it might be 50 million DDR3 against 2.5m GDDR5. Both have decreased 50%, but GDDR5 will always be proportionatly lower at any point. GDDR5 is simply more difficult to manufactor, that's why it's faster/more expensive.

Anyways, if "Old" RAM was a major cost barrier, PS3 and 360 would be extremely expensive as GDDR3 and (even worse) XDR were out of date many years ago. Yet those RAM are still able to be produced cheaply today.