TR Forums

As the subject says, Crucial says they will have DDR4 available to the public by the end of the year.

http://www.crucial.com/promo/DDR4.aspx

Shazaam!! Too bad there's nothing that actually uses it, but given the initial prices most people would be afraid of DDR4 anyway. By 2015 though... it could be pretty nice.

Every memory transition is pretty painful; still, 2015 sounds good to me. Maybe by then we'll have iGPUs/APUs and software that can put the extra bandwidth to use.

The irony is that they are comparing DDR4 to the first stage of DDR3 without all the massive improvements that it has made over the past few years. DDR3 2133 at 1.2v is not far outside the imagination.

Star Brood wrote:

The irony is that they are comparing DDR4 to the first stage of DDR3 without all the massive improvements that it has made over the past few years. DDR3 2133 at 1.2v is not far outside the imagination.

It might seem manipulative but it's not that bad, they are just comparing the initial products of a given memory type. To be fair we would have to travel to the future and compare the final DDR4 with the final DDR3.

2015 sounds good, yeah. AMD will probably lead this effort since they need it for APUs and Intel's memory controller is such that the difference between stock 1600 and mad-OC'd is negligible.

I suspect that the main advantage (at least initially) will be in reduced power usage. A 20% drop in voltage has the potential to significantly cut power consumption and heat dissipation, since (all else being equal) power usage is proportional to the square of supply voltage. We will probably see initial adoption mostly in the mobile market (e.g. tablets), where people are willing to pay more for increased battery life.

DDR4 will make it easier to build 8GiB and 16GIB DIMMs. It will not be far-fetched to see desktop system being able to handle 64GiB or more without spending an arm and leg.

If DDR3 hadn't been manipulated spiked to triple price from last year, adoption of 4 would be delayed that much more.

4 has little to nothing to do with density btw, thats all process shrinks. And 3 has been through quite a few of those already, ~20nm sure as hell wasn't around in 2007, but the ~20X larger 90nm was.

I'll take the lower voltage and higher bandwidth per clock, but only at a fair market price. I can sit and wait enough quarters for their greed to naturally cause an "oversupply" which occurs when they stop colluding and start competing, then buy it cheap before manipulation happens. Cpus aren't getting that much faster lately anyways. (gee wonder why...)

Saw that. Broadwell will be using DDR3 still, right?

If so the first chip due for DDR4 will be the Haswell-E if that's the case, so early 2015... Will hate to see the price premium the memory will commend on that platform!

DDR4 makes it easier to make higher density modules, because it requires less voltage so you aren't pushing the silicon as hard. Which means more you can more DIMM chips out of the wafer. That's why DDR3 4GiB and 8GiB unbuffered DIMMs exist and are affordable while DDR2 only got as far as 4GiB as FB-DIMMs before it became too cost prohibitive to go any further.

I've been buying 1.35 V DDR3. Am I halfway there already?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148663
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148657

JustAnEngineer wrote:

I've been buying 1.35 V DDR3. Am I halfway there already?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148663

Also running a kit of that 1.35v Ballistix Sport but in 32GB. I still can't get over how freaking tiny those modules are.... the literal definition of what "low-profile" should have been. Any shorter and the sticks wouldn't even be able to latch into the slots!!

Which now makes me wonder... if Ballistix Sport modules can be condensed to almost half the height of a typical DIMM, then it looks like we could already use a new form-factor for DDR modules. Best time to introduce one is with a new memory standard...