These new memory technologies usually have disadvantages or only poor gains over the previous, mature tech till they mature themselves. AMD has -- I think wisely -- always been late to adopt new memory types. Intel on the other hand has always been early, sometimes forcing customers to pay more for little benefit. And remember RAMBUS? Intel thought that was the future. Oops. Looks like the same thing is happening on the server side with FB-DIMMs (even AMD was hit by this when they wasted design time on using this that could have gone into catching up with Intel).

2010? or "a little sooner" for phenoms?
That seems a little late, but maybe that's just me.
The integrated memory controller complicating things?

So the big question is just how much faster is DDR3 over DDR2? As many variables being equal, that is.

I thought AM3 would have 939 pins and that these 45nm chips will have 939 in such a way that they fit in AM2(+) and AM3. This report makes it sound a little different.

So the speed standard for DDR3 will be 1600 most likely
Which is around $300-500 for 2x2gb sets

I thought AM3 has 1 missing pin so that it wouldn't take AM2 chips (which wouldn't be supported anyway) but would fit into am2/am2+ sockets.

EDIT: In response to post #1

AM2+ is 940 pins.

Its sad that AM3 won't be backwards compatible though. That was going to be a big selling point for going with the AMD upgrade path for me. Oh well, at least AMD can count on me buying a 4870 (as soon as a Diamond is f'ing in stock!)

That's right, throw the high bandwidth, low power memory at the single socket segment that needs it least.

Oh wait ...

This is very clever. When DDR3 ram starts to cost the same or less than DDR2, all AMD needs to do is change the packaging on the chip, not design, validate, and fab a whole new revision. Bring on the low-cost, high density DDR3!