Samsung Makes More 40nm DDR3 Chips

Samsung's 40nm DDR3 entered mass production in early 2009, but it seems that demand for modules constructed with such chips has become so high that current inventories cannot keep up. Seeing this as a clear sign that the semiconductor industry has genuinely resumed its growth, after a couple of dismal years, the company has decided to increase the output of 1Gb, 2Gb and 4Gb chips.

DRAM demand only took off a short time ago, when Intel's latest series of high-end server processors, the Xeon 5600 series, debuted. These CPUs sparked a new interest on the professional and industrial markets, which saw the significant improvement in processing power and efficiency as a good basis for better and less costly servers and data centers. This, in turn, caused a surge in RAM demand, especially for registered memory modules. Of course, 40nm DDR3 has, itself, the advantage of 40% power savings compared with 60nm chips.

"When used in conjunction with use of the Xeon processor 5600 series and the 5500 and 7500 platforms, DDR3 is designed to dramatically improve the efficiency of data transactions while lowering power consumption in virtually any enterprise server application," Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, said. "Our low-power DDR3 solutions will play a pivotal role in advancing the design of new-generation, 'green' servers."

1Gb, 2Gb and 4Gb DDR3 chips are used to create modules with capacities of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and even 32GB registered DIMMs. These modules are available with clock speeds of 800 Mbps, 1,066Mbps, 1,333Mbps and 1,600Mbps.

"We have been working closely with Samsung to advance the importance of green memory in the data center," Lorie Wigle, general manager, Intel Eco-Technology Office, stated. "Our new multi-core Xeon lines have been designed to not only accommodate the most energy-efficient memory in the market today, but also to provide IT managers with the best power-to-performance ratio for any server environment."