Advanced Micro Devices announced on Monday that it might bring DDR3 support to its upcoming Phenom II desktop processor earlier than previously expected. John Taylor, an AMD spokesman, said that the Sunnyvale chip maker aims at bringing the DDR3 support to its next to come Phenom II chips by mid-2009, but added that, due to various factors like the pricing of the memory, the company might push that up.

According to Taylor, the chip manufacturer will have to introduce the AM3 socket to support DDR3 memory. The company's forthcoming Phenom II CPUs will be supported by the AM3 socket motherboards. AMD expects the AM3 to be launched a few months after the Phenom II is released, that being scheduled for January.

“We want to look at hitting the market at the right time with the right product,” Taylor said. He also revealed that the company would take into consideration both the cost of the DDR3 memory and the benefits it is capable of bringing to users before deciding the exact release date. In the server area of the market, AMD is aiming at shifting to DDR3 memory support with the Maranello platform scheduled for 2010. The upcoming platform is expected to include the six-core Sao Paulo and 12-core Magny-Cours chips.

As many of you already know, DDR3 is a new form of memory able to deliver larger bandwidth for quicker data transfers when compared to DDR2. The latest chips are much faster too, and DDR3 could provide faster communication between the CPU and the memory, translated into leveraged system performance, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. According to him, DDR3 will be able to boost even more the performance of the already speedy Phenom II-based machines, although the memory is expensive and rather new.

The first Phenom II chips that are expected to hit the market will be quad-core processors and will include 8M bytes of cache, as AMD announced earlier. The chip manufacturer hasn't disclosed any pricing information on the upcoming chips. Even so, it is already a known fact that the CPUs are great overclockers, as recent tests have showed.