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Top Chinese memory maker expected to abandon DDR4 manufacturing at the behest of Beijing

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CXMT just reached peak DDR4 production, but it's now prioritizing DDR5.

DDR4 RAM
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Top Chinese DRAM manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) will reportedly phase out DDR4 memory for servers and PCs by the middle of next year. According to Digitimes, the company is making this sudden shift to accommodate the directives of the Chinese Communist Party, especially as Beijing is pushing the country to take the global lead in AI and cloud infrastructure. In line with this, CXMT is also believed to be prioritizing work on HBM technology, targeting validation of its HBM3 chips by late this year.

This announcement caught many in the industry off guard, especially as the company had just begun mass production of DDR4 memory in late 2024. This ramp-up in capacity, paired with aggressive pricing, has caused leading memory manufacturers Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix to end production of DDR3 and DDR4 chips by late 2025.

But as the Chinese government focuses on AI to compete against the U.S.’s technological supremacy, Beijing is likely directing its local tech giants to give their support. Because of this, industry analysts anticipate CXMT issuing an end-of-life notice for its DDR4 as early as the third quarter of this year. Despite that, DD4 supply has seemingly dried up, with some 8 GB chips jumping in price by 150% because of the lack of supply.

The overall market is heading towards DDR5 production to accommodate the demand for newer devices, but a few DDR4 manufacturing lines will remain. DigiTimes Asia says that CXMT will keep making it for GigaDevice to satisfy demand for consumer memory, while Samsung and SK hynix will keep on producing them using 1z-nm nodes. That means they do not require EUV tools, which are better utilized to produce newer chips.

Despite CXMT’s success in DDR4 memory, its DDR5 chips reportedly still face some issues. It’s been reported that some of its latest samples have failed some tests, with the memory chips becoming unstable when they hit 60 degrees Celsius and up, some 25 degrees lower than the up to 85 degrees Celsius that Samsung chips can operate in. There’s also doubt whether CXMT’s DDR5 memory would perform as expected in sub-zero temperatures. This likely would not be an issue with most users, though.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • teeejay94
    If they are going to abandon it altogether I would like to see heavy focus on producing low latency high clocking memory, I think speed is done for, its where it should be at if not higher, latency is too high tho and reduced latency at 7200MT/s would see a benefit to some degree. And MB manufacturers and game developers please optimize high clocking ram as well I can't even run my 7200MT max speed without most things freaking out including windows itself. Ram may need to see voltage above 1.45v to achieve proper stability. That's another conversation though.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    They design to a power target, not speed. High speed memory is the result of careful binning and overclocking. That is what you pay the 'gaming' memory companies for. Everyone else just wants stability and volume.

    In truth the answer to higher speed memory is tighter integration. Which is why you see much higher performance numbers on laptop SoCs. So either we go CAMM2 on the desktop for modular memory, or desktop CPUs start shipping with integrated memory. That we can even hit speeds like 10000+ is kind of amazing.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    teeejay94 said:
    If they are going to abandon it altogether I would like to see heavy focus on producing low latency high clocking memory, I think speed is done for, its where it should be at if not higher,
    Memory bandwidth has not kept pace with CPUs and GPUs. It needs to keep going up, if you want to have any hope of keeping most of those cores busy.

    teeejay94 said:
    latency is too high tho and reduced latency at 7200MT/s would see a benefit to some degree.
    DRAM latency only accounts for about 10% to 20% of overall system memory latency.

    Furthermore, the rated memory latency (most notably CAS timing) only pertains to a situation where your memory subsystem is underutilized. Near full utilization, your typical latency benefits more by increasing bandwidth. HBM is a great example of this - it typically has higher latency than DDR, but its massive bandwidth means queue occupancy tends to be quite low. This leads to lower typical latency, in strenuous workloads.

    teeejay94 said:
    And MB manufacturers and game developers please optimize high clocking ram as well I can't even run my 7200MT max speed without most things freaking out including windows itself. Ram may need to see voltage above 1.45v to achieve proper stability. That's another conversation though.
    That's a hardware issue. There's nothing software developers can do about it. If your hardware doesn't work correctly, software is going to malfunction. There's no way they can anticipate or reliably work around such problems. Make sure your hardware works properly, and then you shouldn't have any more problems.
    Reply
  • Notton
    DDR5 has been a flop.
    DDR6 can't come soon enough. It doubles DDR5's channel width to 4x64-bit, and we'll get to see quad-channel on a desktop CPU without resorting to HEDT or Strix Halo.
    Reply
  • systemBuilder_49
    Admin said:
    ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is expected to end production of DDR4 memory in favor of DDR5 by mid-2026.

    Top Chinese memory maker expected to abandon DDR4 manufacturing at the behest of Beijing : Read more
    Good riddance! 32GB Of 3600 DDR4 Memory for $25 (the recent aliexpress price) is just stupid and an obvious sign that China is trying to murder all DRAM makers worldwide!
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Notton said:
    DDR5 has been a flop.
    Huh? No.

    Early on, DDR5 regressed on latency. For gamers, this was a bad deal. However, in heavy multi-core workloads, the added bandwidth and parallelism provided by DDR5 has been a godsend. This can be most easily seen here:

    Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core-i912900k-review-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/8
    Since then, DDR5 has made a lot of progress on latency, while continuing to scale up to ever higher amounts of bandwidth.

    If you just want to play games, go ahead and use DDR4. If you buy a CPU with lots of cores/threads and do heavy compute workloads, it'd be counterproductive to stick with DDR4.

    Notton said:
    DDR6 can't come soon enough. It doubles DDR5's channel width to 4x64-bit, and we'll get to see quad-channel on a desktop CPU without resorting to HEDT or Strix Halo.
    Technically, DDR5 is already quad-channel. Each 64-bit DIMM is subdivided into two, independent, 32-bit subchannels. This improves memory parallelism, though I think the main reason was just to supporting higher clock speeds. We first saw this with LPDDR4, I think.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    It'll be interesting to see what sort of impact this has on the DDR4 market given that Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix have had to step back for economic reasons.

    DDR6 is a long way out still as the specification hasn't been finalized yet and the last update I saw they hadn't decided on signaling yet. I'd guess 2027 at the earliest unless server demand is high, but I'm betting MRDIMM is covering that gap. LPDDR6 is much closer to finalization, but I think we probably won't see it in PC products until next year.
    Reply