DDR4 Memory Will Be Released By Next Month | Hacker News Reader

DDR4 Memory Will Be Released By Next Month

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50 pointsafricanos2326 comments

What an amazingly vapid article. First off, Crucial's comparing DDR4 release specs to DDR3 release specs; in the 6 years since it came out, DDR3 has more than doubled in speed. Second, because memory controllers need to be altered to support DDR4, you won't be able to buy it in a computer for at least another year until either Intel or AMD will release chipsets compatible with DDR4. Finally, there's absolutely no discussion in there about the interesting parts of DDR4, like it moving to a pci-e style architecture of multiple channels. So no, don't hold your breath waiting for DDR4, you'll just pass out and hit your head on the coffee table.

It's just blogspam. Here is the original source, which according to The Wayback Machine was created almost a year ago: http://www.crucial.com/promo/DDR4.aspx

The chipset no longer contains the memory controller, the CPU does. To use DD4 you'd need not only a new motherboard but a new processor.

That can't be right. Dance-Dance Revolution III is not out yet.

I thought it was strange that such an article made it to the frontpage. I guess I assumed a lot of people on Hacker News play dance games...

Hahaha my first thought exactly...

Wait, they went this long without a DDRIII? Is this like Street Fighter series where it went 1, 2, 2 Champion Edition, 2 Turbo, 2 Hyper Fighting, Super * 2 Turbo, Alpha, Alpha 2, Alpha 2 Gold, Ex, Ex Plus, Ex Plus Alpha, Three?

edit: wait, forgot the X-Men/Marvel Vs. series.

But what systems will be able to use it? Afaik Intel announced DDR4 for Haswell-EP which is supposed to come out in late 2014.

Even then, won't this be of little impact to practical performance benchmarks?

We are not talking about bypassing the limitation imposed by slow interconnect busses.

I've been out of the hardware scene for a while. Someone more-knowledgeable please correct me or back me up.

well, it's also going to save some power and allows larger amounts of memory. I'm just wondering why they would put it on the market in a month when nobody outside R&D labs has the hardware to use it yet.

Altera at the very least has FPGAs you can buy right now that offers DDR4 interfaces [1]. Also, I imagine a lot of this is directed towards OEMs who can get the early silicon samples of Haswell-E chips so they can start testing with them.

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/10AX066H4F34I4SGES/...

integrated gpus should benefit from additional bandwidth.

Anandtech has some fantastic articles on memory speeds and the impact on applications, such as http://www.anandtech.com/show/7495/adata-xpg-v2-review-2400-.... There are measurable differences, though they are "slightly pushing the edges" rather than being make or break.

Aren't they using DDR5 on video cards?

Sheesh people just started buying 1150 chipset motherboards, they have to buy again?

That's "GDDR5" which is tuned specifically for graphics applications. According to Wiki it's still based on DDR3.

I think that's GDDR5 which is something different (and roughly comparable to [edit: DDR3]).

Also, for this comparison, hasn't DDR3 had much higher speeds than 1066MHz for a while now anyway? isn't it up to 1866MHz? so the comparisons claimed speed improvements seem exaggerated. I'd be interested to know the real world difference this would make anyway. For logistical reasons I recently had to order a workstation with DDR3-1600 rather DDR3-1866 memory but couldn't find out how much of a real world impact this would have.

If it is based on DDR3, video cards that use it are significantly faster than the same card that uses DDR3

GDRR5 leverage the fact that the memory chips are soldered, compared to DIMM slots for DDR3. That can be use to improve the performance. Now don't ask me for more details, I'm not an expert in this area.

If you mean it's faster than the same card using GDDR3, that's because GDDR3 is based on DDR2.

Fantastic naming scheme, isn't it?

There are also plenty of cards that use DDR3, without the G. GDDR5-using cards are much faster than them.

Huh, wasn't aware of that. Is it mostly budget cards that aren't really intended for gaming, or do you see it in low-end gaming cards as well?

Official JEDEC specs only go up to 1066. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM#JEDEC_standard_modu... Other speeds are possible, but compatibility is very limited.

> For logistical reasons I recently had to order a workstation with DDR3-1600 rather DDR3-1866 memory but couldn't find out how much of a real world impact this would have.

In my experience, RAM speed is not noticeable in practical daily use. I used to have two 2GB sticks of high performance (for the time) RAM in my system overclocked, but when RAM prices fell to the point where I could get another 2x4GB budget set for <$30 I opted to go with a heterogeneous setup and miss out on overclockability. The transformatively positive impact on perceived speed achieved by going from 4GB to 12GB (because of the fact that I almost never touch swap now) completely overwhelmed the iteratively negative impact on perceived speed from dropping from 1600MHz to 1066MHz and from CL7 to CL11. I really did not perceive any increase in general sluggishness, even though I had somewhat been anticipating one.

My takeaway from that experience is that for general purpose workstations, DDR3+ is now fast enough that price per GB should be preferred over advertised/benchmarked performance numbers insofar as it allows you to fit more RAM into your given budget.

> I think that's GDDR5 which is something different (and roughly comparable to [edit: DDR3]).

GDDR5 is based on DDR3, but I wouldn't call it comparable to it. It has a completely redesigned physical interface, with a lot of cool innovations and ideas that make it faster and better. Some of those innovations return to the main memory types with DDR4.

You can get up to DDR3-3000 from what I've seen but performance varies with application. The problem is that throughput isn't the only important metric, latency determined by the timing specs of the module are also very important. Higher throughput modules generally have significantly worse latency. For some applications, the throughput is far more important than latency but for many applications latency is just as important if not more important.

There are a few benchmarks at different speeds / latencies here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7495/adata-xpg-v2-review-2400-...

I'm a bit confused myself, since I saw an article that said the PS4 was using DDR5 for its main memory.

[edit] found it "The PS4 has 8GB of memory distributed across 16 GDDR5 modules" so it is GDDR5 not DDR5 being used as main memory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4

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