I’m picking-up sorts of excitement in the industry about DDR3 memory.

When it gets here, I expect that DDR3 should be fast, efficient and what every well dressed server or PC is likely to have. I say “when it gets here,” not because it’s not available – it is – but because it may not quite be ready for prime-time today.

Some of the DRAM vendors are saying that the DDR3 crossover point is shifting. Might it make more sense for them to postpone the CAPEX improvements to speed DDR3 cost reductions to the other side of the world’s current financial troubles? I guess there is no point dropping the price and failing to get the ROI on the investment if you don’t need to.

As I search the Web, it appears the current price of DDR3 is more than double that of DDR2, and we believe that mass adoption of DDR3 will only occur when it achieves price parity with DDR2. If I had to guess, that would be sometime mid- 2010.

In discussions with customers, it’s been suggested that solutions which require DDR3 may not be as interesting till sometime in 2010 because of the price parity issue as well as the fact that low-voltage DDR3 memory isn’t expected to be on the market until that timeframe.

The very real comparisons to RAMBUS and FB DIMM should be on all our minds, as they are stinging reminders to customers about being on the bleeding edge of a memory transition.  RAMBUS held promise as a better memory technology, but the licensing costs drove the market to adopt SDRAM instead, making SDRAM the volume technology (the Betamax syndrome). And just a few years ago, FB DIMMs were heralded as the “must have” memory technology for servers. Those that jumped on the bandwagon soon found their platforms to be less competitive because FB DIMMs drove up power consumption at a time when companies were beginning to seriously investigate lower power consumption in the datacenter.

You may want to be with the crowd, not ahead of it, on this one.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.