If you"re planning on buying DDR memory you"d better get your skates on, as spot market watcher Marco Fumagalli tells us that 256MB sticks are likely to hit $60 on the spot market at the beginning of next week.
Currently, and in the European market, such sticks are costing around $57, with these prices spot market rather than retail market prices.
The panic stations are happening because big PC manufacturers are all in a tizzy.
They"ve been told by the Dramurai that allocation of DDR memory is going to be tight for some weeks, and so have started moving into the spot market to mop up stocks there, too.
Over 90 per cent of PC production in the next month or two will use motherboards that support DDR (double data rate) memory chipsets, whether those be from Intel, Via, SIS or whoever.
We"re still interested in quite how the memory manufacturers, who were well aware of this shift for over a year, managed to get caught with their pants down.