Posts tagged with DDR3

While the prices for DDR-3 memory on the desktop side are finally starting to fall into reasonable price levels, the server world is still not there yet when it comes to the transition to DDR-3 memory.

Just this past week, we saw that there is still a lot of volatility in the memory market, and memory is a commodity that has a huge impact on the price of a server.

For instance, taking a quick look at Crucial (http://www.crucial.com) shows that in comparing the prices of 2GB and 4GB DIMMs, there is still a pretty substantial premium on DDR-3.

(pricing for single DIMM SKUs, as of 7/09/09 at http://www.crucial.com)

For customers buying servers, memory is often the most expensive part of the system. With four and eight DIMMs per socket, you can easily see the price differential rocket upward as the system requirements grow.

Where desktops generally use 2GB of memory or 4GB for more power users (Windows Vista 32-bit only sees about 3GB), in the server space we are talking about 16GB as the minimal point of entry and 32GB as a common configuration.  Couple this with the more expensive registered, ECC memory that servers demand, and you can start to feel the pain in your budget.

By utilizing the energy-efficient DDR-2 memory, AMD Opteron^TM processor-based platforms can take advantage of the economies of scale as they grow the memory capacity on their servers to meet the needs of the business.

Next year, when the DDR-3 memory prices for server memory have likely started to drop out of the stratosphere and down into a reasonable range, we’re planning for our Q1 2010 platform, codenamed “Maranello”, to go to market with support for DDR-3 memory.  And, more importantly, low voltage DDR-3 memory.  The low voltage offerings, along with these anticipated lower prices, should make DDR-3 the smart choice for server customers.

So, while the cost of migrating a desktop from DDR-2 to DDR-3 is becoming reasonable for many customers, we still have a long way to go before DDR-3 has similar economic advantages for the server market.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products 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 linked sites and no endorsement is implied.