We all know how DDR2 is struggling to keep up with DDR, which in turn makes Intel struggle against AMD who has better performing microprocessors for the gaming and enthusiast crowd. Although Intel has managed to be "successful" with its latest generation of hardware in the OEM segment, thanks to Dell, majority of the enthusiasts tend to stay far away from Intel’s latest platform due to an unfortunate performance hit with newer standards and technologies.

After we recently published our AMD May Skip DDR2 Altogether report, a source pointed out a detail to us. According to the insider, Intel was aware of the poor design of DDR2, but continue to move forward due to its possible struggle to keep up with AMD. Since Intel never had a hard-hitting reply to AMD’s Athlon 64 microprocessors, Intel went ahead and introduced a new platform that would future-proof many systems with DDR2 and PCIe technologies. This could very well be a vision on Intel’s part, but thus far, DDR2 has not exactly matured in terms of performance and price parity, though it’s rapidly approaching that stage.

The source said Intel might follow on AMD’s footsteps if the world’s second largest chipmaker skipped DDR2 and went straight to either DDR3 or XDR. Intel has already started sampling both XDR and DDR3 for initial testing. The world’s largest chipmaker even has boards that support the aforementioned standards. Samsung is also ramping their production on XDR, so the chances of DDR2 having a short lifespan are highly possible.

According to the insider, Intel always planned DDR2 to quickly fade away from the market, so the company won’t be in a shock if they have to move to DDR3 or XDR in the near future. In fact, that was Intel’s plan all along, since DDR2 was a poor architecture to begin with.

All in all, you can expect high latencies on DDR3 with huge bandwidth. Since DDR3 or XDR are talks of the future, our source was unable to comment on the new pricing models. Get ready, as the market is about to get complicated even more.