Samsung paves the way for 32GB DDR3 sticks

Peter G. 30 Jan, 2009 at 1:26pm ET Article published in Tech

Samsung has announced new memory chips that open the door for 8 and 16GB DDR3 memory sticks in the future. The new four gigabit chips are manufactured using a 50nm process, which increases capacity and lowers power consumption up to 40 percent compared to current offerings.

Information Week reports suggest Samsung will initially offer the new chips on 16GB DIMMs for servers and 8GB DIMMs for desktops.

24GB of triple channel DDR3 doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Comments

30 Jan 2009 ~ 1:45pm Snarkasm Forget 24. With six sticks in triple-channel, I'll take 48 gigs, thxuverymuch.
30 Jan 2009 ~ 2:19pm Khaos Hallo RAM drive. Boner.

Do want to prefetch entire game levels into system memory.

Seamless CryEngine worlds, plzthx.
30 Jan 2009 ~ 2:25pm AlexDeGruven

Snarkasm wrote:

Forget 24. With six sticks in triple-channel, I'll take 48 gigs, thxuverymuch.

That's only 8GB sticks, though. With 32GB sticks, you could load your MoBo up with 32x6GB of RAM, which is actually 192GB.
30 Jan 2009 ~ 2:29pm BuddyJ Now you two are just being greedy.
30 Jan 2009 ~ 2:32pm MiracleManS What would anyone do with 512kb of memory?!
30 Jan 2009 ~ 2:44pm AlexDeGruven

Buddy J wrote:

Now you two are just being greedy.

Actually, it makes practical sense from a precaching and preloading sense.

Think about the OS being able to leverage memory in this manner:

You open MS Word. The system has a history of the last x number of documents you've worked with. When Word finishes loading, the system also background loads the 10 most frequently-used documents, so they're available in an instant. Additionally, as resources permit, the system background loads Excel and Access because you've had a history of using them before. Business users would eat this up.

You fire up PowerDVD to watch a movie, the system loads and decompresses into RAM the entire movie in the background, allowing you to skip back and forth, change chapters, etc completely instantly.

Moving to massive amounts of RAM is going to greatly increase performance from a front-end perspective, as well as possibly serve to decrease power consumption, since you could power spindled devices down almost as soon as the system is done loading.