14 DAY TRIAL // I’d love to tell you that you can finally go to a tech store and buy DDR4 memory for your PC, but it would be a big, fat lie, despite the fact that Micron has just released DDR4 chips.
For one thing, PC motherboards don’t have the technology for DDR4 yet. Or, rather, the Intel and AMD CPUs/APUs don’t have it yet.
That’s why the DDR4 RAM that Micron released will only be usable by server platforms designed specifically with support for it.
It can be used in RDIMMs, LRDIMMs, VLP RDIMMs, UDIMMs and SODIMMs (ECC and non-ECC), or as x4, x8 and x16 components. NVDIMM samples will come out in the third quarter.
The new chips have a capacity of 4 Gb and should be recognized by a system as long as that system is run by an Intel Xeon E52600 v3 processor.
The chip has a clock of 2133 MHz. For comparison, DDR3 usually runs at 1333 MHz or 1600, without overclocking.
Samples of a 2,400 MT/s device are also ready, even if they won’t make it to market before 2015. All the new chips are JEDEC-compliant.
No word on contracts yet, but I can imagine that bigwigs like IBM and Cray will scope out the possibilities at the very least.