The specification for DDR (Double Data Rate) 4 has not been ratified by JDEC (Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council) just yet so these are far from being a final product. Still we can expect DDR4 to kick off at around 2400MHz and top our somewhere in the 5000MHz range as far as actual speed goes. You can expect a Mega Transfer range of 2133 – 4266 per second while the required voltages drop to 1.05 for 2400MHz and 1.2V for higher clocked DDR4. DDR4 will also be manufactured using a 30nm process.

Micron hopes to have a finalized JDEC specification so they can ramp production up by Q4 of this year (2012). Originally DDR4 was not expected to hit the market until late 2013 or early 2014, but it looks like we might see if hit the enterprise market in servers near the end of H1 2013. From there we can expect them to trickle down into the enthusiast/consumer market before the latter half of 2013 perhaps in time for Ivy Bridge E to drop which would be a nice option to have. Of course this would mean the the IMC in Ivy Bridge would need to be setup with DDR3 and DDR4 support (which is possible). We will have to wait and see where this goes. Of course, if Samsung gets its way and they can drop DDR4 in their servers (running new Xeons) we might find that we will have a new memory to play with soon.

It will be very interesting to see what happens between now and then.

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