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More Adventures down DDR3 lane
Author: Richard SwinburnePublished: 16th April 2007
A 2GB Hynix DDR3 module rated at 7-7-7, akin to a Cheetah on Ice.
Naturally a couple of DDR3 manufacturers caught this
Firstly, Hynix was showing off a 2GB strip of DDR3 rated 1066MHz and with rather loose timings of 7-7-7 (you read that right -- Ed) and said it was getting pretty good yields despite what others, like Nanya, have said to be suffering. (OT: The company representatives remained tight lipped about their GDDR4 production however).
A quick stroll around the corner and I bumped into Samsung who offered a greater depth of detail: it isn’t making its DRAMs at 70nm like this poor hack was lead to believe was a standard. Instead Samsung is sticking with good old 80nm as it costs just as much to make the memory chips larger for the same density as DDR2.
Samsung's spokesperson explained that because of the increment in speed, and greater bit-depth prefetch (upped from four to eight), this means that you need bigger cells with larger silicon gaps to cope: making the overall die bigger. Samsung won't move to 70nm until DDR3 saturation reaches a critical point of one million units and didn’t expect to be there until Q2 next year.
So, while new tech will not only sell for a premium it’ll be more expensive because it either requires a new process or a more silicon, depending on what modules you buy.
A final quick question I asked Samsung before I left was if it was going to ever sell performance memory again, like Micron is currently doing with its popular D9 DRAM chips, was snuffed at. Basically, Samsung sees no monetary gain in supplying anyone other than OEMs and doesn’t want people putting high voltages through their memory then killing its sticks. It’s simply a matter of why put the effort in if there isn’t much money to be gained. One wonders what an equally huge corporation like Micron see in the business then...
Looking forward to DDR3? Or couldn't you give two shakes of a cats tail? Let us know in the forums, and remember: stroking those kitties reduces stress.
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Comments (16)
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S'pose is depends on whether they care about smaller supplies rather than just supplying big OEM's.
i woudn't worry too much yet about the crap timings, wait till ocz, corsair and co introduce their ddr3 products to the market, the module's in the article are most likely just the cheap stuff for the masses that buy their complete computers at a local electronics (or food ) store.
I dont really get this whole ddr2, ddr3 stuff. The only real performance increase I see with ram, is when you add more.
OCZ and Corsair use the stuff these guys are making. They are just chip repackagers not DRAM manufacturers.
Interesting.....I thought they manufactured this stuff and just built on what the original idea was...
yes and no,
yes, because they buy their chips,
no, because they cherry pick the best chips and sell them at clocks (and or latencies) that by far exceed what they where originally specified for.
Yes, they get batches from Micron and test them themselves to get a list of frequencies the ICs are capable of. They still don't manufacture the IC's at all. Even overclocking and upping the voltage means they can't control what chips they get, hence why 10k modules are so very rare.
At 7-7-7 you'll only get 5 or 4 if your exceptionally lucky imo. It's not like putting money into research to manufacture faster cores that can then be tailored to whatever Corsair would want them for :) But it still means they can shop around for the best overclocking memory. If Samsung or Hynix are crap, just go back to Micron.