DDR4 SDRAM aiming to break 4GHZ speed barrier

The memory market is extremely competitive, with manufacturers pushing speeds higher and higher every couple of months. News earlier this week hit the KitGuru newsdesk that HyperX DDR3 from Kingston had managed to break the 3GHZ barrier.

DDR4 won't be hitting the market overnight, many manufacturers feel there is plenty of life left in the current DDR3 platform, and best guesstimates of a release are around 2014-2015.

The JEDEC standards group announced their intentions to finalise the DDR4 specification sometime in 2011 and then for commercial production to take place in 2012. DDR4 SDRAM is set to have a radical change to the topology of the chipset memory subsystems within server, desktop and laptop sectors. With Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge E platform based on socket LGA 2011 expected to feature quad channel DDR3 memory this would require a point to point memory controller design in which parallelism moves from the DIMM channels to the memory controller directly.

DDR3 is still very alive and kicking with a new frequency standard set to hit, meaning that it could reach 2133mhz with merely 1.25v. DDR4 should easily scale to 4ghz within the next 4 years offering huge performance gains for both industrial and consumer systems.

As well as receiving performance speed gains, the new standard is set to feature a 3D stacking technique which should allow GB densities to increase. Intel introduced a standard in 2006 called Through Hole Silicon (TSV) which is vertical electrical connection technology used to stack large quantities of CPU cores and memory ICs on top of each other within a 3D space. Meaning less physical space is required.

KitGuru says: By 2015 we would expect to see overclockers even reaching 5ghz speeds with nifty LN2.

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