Upcoming Computing Technology: DDR4 SDRAM

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DDR RAMIn a recent newsletter, Supermicro NZ touched upon a number of up and coming technology developments that they will be soon to adopt, allowing for greater speed and performance from their servers and desktops. This is exciting for us, since Supermicro is the brand of server we prefer, and often recommend to our customers.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing a brief overview of the different developments announced, which are as follows:

  • DDR4 SDRAM
  • SAS 3.0 12Gb/s
  • SATA Express 16Gb/s
  • NVM Express (NVMe)

This is what Supermicro had to say about the first of these developments, DDR4 SDRAM:

“DDR4 SDRAM is the latest variant of DRAM main memory to succeed the common DDR3 memory widely used today. While it is unfortunately not compatible with DDR3 it promises higher speeds and lower power consumption as an evolutionary step. In the later half of this year (2014) we should start to see computing platforms adopt this latest memory technology in order to offer higher computing performance. Pricing and availability will remain high and scarce respectively until mainstream demand picks up later this year. The early DDR4 products will be released at speeds of 2133 MT/s compared to the fastest DDR3 memory at 1866 MT/s today. DDR4 is expected to scale to at least 3200 MT/s and possibly beyond to 4266 MT/s.”

To fully grasp the importance of this development, you’ll need to know how RAM works. EBay offers a terrific (and simple) explanation here. Put simply, more RAM means more programs and processes can be handled at once, which is especially handy for a server, being the centrepiece of a busy office.

Next week I’ll touch on the second development, Serial Attached SCSI 3.0 (SAS3).