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Micron announces DDR4 module prior to release of official spec.

by Alistair Lowe on 8 May 2012, 10:33

Tags: Micron (NASDAQ:MU)

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Officially launched in 2007, DDR3 is starting to show its age five years down the line and is now a little power hungry and sluggish when compared against other offerings outside of the DDR spec. It's good news then, perhaps, that memory maker, Micron, has announced that it has already shipped out samples to "key partners" of memory based on the new and near-final, DDR4 spec.

Micron's chips are based on 30nm technology, with the shipped modules featuring a 4Gb x 8 configuration rated at 2,400MT/s. The firm plans to also introduce x16 and x32 parts, eventually ramping up to speeds of 3,200MT/s, the expected industry standard.

Initial reports of the DDR4 standard suggest that 2,400MT/s will be the minimum required transfer rate, with 3,200MT/s available immediately at the enthusiast end of the market, with hopes that the standard can scale up to 4,266MT/s. It's believed that the standard will also push for lower power usage, with a maximum rating of 1.2V, obtained from a move to sub-40nm manufacturing processes and perhaps the integration of power-saving techniques deployed in other technologies, such as 'pseudo open drain' from GDDR.

Looking to remove the mess that has appeared recently, with dual, triple and quad channel DDR3 memory variants, DDR4 will likely require a point-to-point configuration where a single module is connected to a single channel in the controller.

Despite its announcement to support DDR4, like many other firms who have joined the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) Consortium, Micron believes that there is more potential in a new HMC standard, which proposes to offer a 15-fold increase over current DDR3 memory performance, whilst taking 90 per cent less space and consuming 70 per cent less energy - perhaps one to keep an eye on as the specification is expected to be announced sometime this year.



HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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Quick, so it is. And here was me being concerned about the cost of upgrading from DDR2 to DDR3 system. May as well wait now. Ivy Bridge with these puppies will be well fast.
Ivy bridge has only a DDR3 controller, it won't support these modules.
I was wondering when DDR4 would be introduced. The industry moved from DDR to DDR2 fairly fast then stopped on DDR3 for ages. Must be what 4 year on DDR3 now, think it was realeased with Nehalem.
Progress is all good, but memory speed makes very little difference anyway, due to all the caching in modern CPUs because the latency to access system RAM is so awful. Modern CPU dies (excluding ones with GPUs included) are pretty much a small amount of execution logic floating in a sea of cache.

That hybrid memory cube stuff sounds ace though. I'd imagine a large cube memory placed within the same package as the CPU die would be pretty ace. Wonder if that'd be possible?
geez, i am still using ddr2. now here comes ddr4 ?