eva2000

The thought came to me what if DDR2 memory manufacturers do a Micron (like they did with Micron 46v32m8 5B revC dies), and in order to reduce cost of producing DDR2 memory and compete, they do a die revision to something very crappy and can't sustain lower latencies i.e. 4-4-4-12 vs 3-2-2-8 ? Could that ever happen ?

Your thoughts ?

ArcTan

It will happen eventually
same thing happened with winbond

imo, they should recognise the performance ram market and have some IC's tailored for that like maybe TCCD. Maybe do that and only use it on higher end memory and not generic memory
I'm sure there would be enough compaies to cater for this

kasi

Die revision, does that mean making it on a smaller process? If so, maybe this is of interest: "Japanese memory maker Elpida said it has started producing DDR2 memory chips using a 90 nanometre manufacturing process. It will release 512Mbit and 1Gigabit SDRAM chips using the smaller process next year." from here

eva2000

die revision could mean anything.. i think ?

kasi

I see, so what you are saying is that the memory makers will be more likely to revise the die of the memory IC to get a higher yield or other cost saving benefits and thus more profit rather than to increase performance. Well I suppose if they want to make money that is the logical thing for them to do. I wonder how the other upcoming memory technologies tie in with this idea? I suppose you could still get better performance even if the chips have a higher latency if you made some other improvements to the way memory works or to the way it communicates with the CPU. This will become more important when you need to to use more memory, such as the ever increasing memory requirements of games or for newer operating systems. I'm thinking of things like OCZ's Zero Buffer technology or Samsung's Fully Buffered (FB-DIMM). Although it isn't DDR2, even Rambus XDR XDIMM may be a goer. I don't understand much about all this stuff but it will be interesting to see what happens because it seems like there are a lot of different technologies that are ready to be released. This is particularly so with AMD because with the memory controller integrated into the CPU, they will have to choose which one to go with from the available choices. Hopefully it will work out that we can get better performance for less money.