Standard to be made official by JEDEC this year. We wouldn't expect to upgrade any time soon though...
Micron have officially announced they've pretty much putting the
finishing touches on their first DDR4 modules. Initially clocking in at
2.4GHz (dual data rate) scheduled to rise to 3.2GHz the Micron parts are
manufactured on 30nm and expected to debut at 1.2v (versus 1.5v for
DDR3). The chip itself is a 512mb one, implying a desktop 'DIMM' size
of 4-8GB. While a lot other news sites are (slightly) aburst with this,
we do remember that Samsung actually minted the very first DDR4
module last year.
Ok to be honest we just Googled it, but at least we checked:
Either way, this is the penultimate step in a long process aimed at
getting faster and lower voltage memory into computers. The standards
authority JEDEC began defining DDR4 over a half decade ago and once
finalised, official DDR4 production will commence by various
manufacturers. Servers, followed by low-voltage applications such as
smartphone and tablet processors are expected to be first to snap up the
new memory, followed by desktops around 2015.
Extremely keen upgraders
could in theory pick up their first
part of a 2015 'Broadwell' based system at the end of this year. For
the rest of us, we remain 'stuck' with DDR3, but given both AMD and
Intel based systems seem to have an overkill of memory bandwidth right
now, we should easily be able to stand the wait. Though 3.2 GHz just
sounds awesome.
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