The Tri Channel Let Down

October 16, 2008

With Intels new core i7 came tri channel DDR3. There was a lot of speculation about what adding all the bandwidth would do, and apparently, it doesn’t do much. There was a comparison of an underclocked QX9770 vs the Bloomfield i7 940. In most of the test done, there were incremental increases in performance, and in some instances there was a performance hit.

I figure that Bloomfield is a chip of tomorrow, not of today, when we have native 64 bit systems and multithreaded everything, Bloomfield will have its relevance. As far as triple channel memory goes, it seems it doesn’t have a place yet on the desktop market, yet. So, what does all this mean? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see until the hardware actually comes out, but in the mean time, don’t be so quick to upgrade just yet.

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Samsung to produce 2Gb DDR3 chips on 50nm

September 29, 2008

Samsung is planning to produce most of their memory chips with 50nm technology. At first they’re going to produce memory chips of 2 Gigabit (twice the amount that they’re producing right now). According to Samsung, the energy production is going to be reduced with 40 percent, compared to the 1 Gb chips.

The new chips are targeted at the server and desktop market, with a maximum speed of 1.3Gbps and the voltages 1.5v and 1.35v (DDR3 standard). Samsung expects to be producing the 2 Gb chips somewhere in the end of this year.

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