Greater bandwidth, lower power
A-Data will be announcing DDR3 modules at Computex 2006 on June 6, 2006. This comes only two weeks after AMD launched its DDR2 supporting
socket AM2 processors. DDR3 is slated to be the DDR2 successor and promises greater bandwidth and lower power. DDR3-1066 MHz modules will be shown at Computex at the A-Data booth. While DDR3-1066 MHz modules will be shown, DDR3 has a lot more headroom available. Modules are expected to ramp up to 1600 MHz in the future. There has been no mention of the memory access latency of DDR3 yet.
The DDR3 shown is in a 240-pin configuration, with 120 pins on each side. A notch 48 pins from the left of one side separates the DIMM so that DDR3 is not accidentally placed in DDR1 or DDR2 motherboards.
AMD is expected to support DDR3 with the upcoming
K8L quad-core processors
in 2008. Intel originally had plans to support DDR3 in Q4'06, though most of these estimates have been scaled back by almost a year. When we had the opportunity to
sit down with Samsung's Directory of DRAM Marketing, Tom Trill, he was very specific with regard to DDR3 placement in future markets. The majority of DRAM customers welcomed DDR2 expecting an immediate ramp up from DDR1 with very little regard for performance or price. Unfortunately for these customers, DDR1 stuck around longer than most had anticipated, and early DDR2 adopters were faced with high cost DDR2-400 and DDR2-533 that provided little, if any performance gains over DDR1-400. Trill warned that the industry as a whole will require major performance gains from DDR3 before jumping head first into into another new DRAM format.
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