DDR3 as a premium RAM technology has been around for a good while now, but the price of setting up a DDR3 system has been less than cost-effective. The benefits of DDR3 haven’t been great enough to justify the huge price gap between common DDR2 and the newer standard. But the changeover has to happen sometime, and it looks like Samsung got a little impatient. They’re offering really tempting pricing on their basic memory modules to memory assemblers, who then will have the choice of passing on the savings to you, the consumer.
Sure, it’s “just” Samsung doing this aggressive pricing, but it suggests that margins and stocks are reaching the tipping point at which DDR3 becomes the standard and DDR2 becomes the budget option. Personally, I can’t wait — I’m looking forward to comparisons between mature Dragon systems (or perhaps AM3) and consumer Core i7 setups, so I can start putting together a completely new system.