Micron Has Working DDR4 Chips. Has To Wait for JDEC for Full Production

Micron-technology2During our coverage of Intel’s Ivy Bridge and in particular our coverage of Asus’ Z77 based motherboards we mentioned that Asus was already starting to use a new tracing layout to deal with increasing memory speeds. The new memory they were working towards was not only DDR3 (up to 3200MHz) but also DDR4. It is a good thing they have already started working on this as we now hear that Micron has working DDR4 memory modules.

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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