The year was 2000. Will Smith’s horrid “Will 2K” jam was finally fading from the radio waves and the scarred minds of millions across the globe. In March, CPU underdog AMD dropped the gigahertz bomb on us, sending shockwaves throughout the tech community, and lighting a fire under Intel’s ass so intense, the heat wasn’t fully dissipated until the last Prescott chip rolled off the assembly lines. AMD had (inadvertently or not) ignited what we all came to know as the GHz war, with Intel fighting for consumer mindshare by turning the GHz dial up to 11 (well, 3.8 anyway), while AMD desperately tried to keep up by ratcheting up their own clock speeds, and slapping on performance rating numbers to show the average Joe that they could still play with the big boys.
With the advent of the Athlon 64 and Opteron chips, AMD set about putting an end to the GHz war, and ever since our x86 overlords have battled on the merits of performance per clock, core count, performance per watt, and performance per inch [of ePeen]… but I digress. The point of all this is that there is a new GHz war in town, one that has gone largely unnoticed, but one that is certainly welcome news to people bent on coaxing more performance out of their desktop systems.
The war I am referring to is taking place in the dimly lit streets and dark alleyways of the DDR3 RAM industry. Most of the major players in the industry have released kit surpassing the ‘magical’ 2 GHz (DDR) mark, with Patriot even offering kit claimed to operate at up to 2500MHz (DDR), but today it’s Super Talent’s turn to show off their new 2000MHz guns they’ve just constructed.
The 2000MHz rating, 1.65V, and latencies of 9-10-9-28 might seem pretty standard fare, but here’s the kicker… these are 4GB DIMM’s we’re talking about here. Super Talent says these babies are made with “the latest high density 2Gb IC’s”, and will be offered as single, dual, or triple channel kits (see table below). No guidance was given as to what memory chips are being used on these, and just about everybody these days has production of 2Gb DDR3 IC’s ramped up. Samsung has even begun producing 4Gb modules on the 40nm process earlier this year.
Unfortunately Super Talent isn’t offering guidance on a release date, or pricing for their kits either, but in this author’s professional opinion, the release date will be somewhere between soon and sooner, and the pricing (for the dual channel kit any way) will likely fall somewhere between $325 and $350 USD considering a quick glance at Newegg shows that G.Skill already has a 2000MHz 2x 4GB kit with similar specs on the market for $350, ready to dent your credit limit today.
Perhaps the best news that can be taken away from all this is the fact that 4GB DIMM’s are slowly, but surely beginning to march out of the factories and into our computers. The fact that companies like Super Talent are releasing performance oriented 4GB modules now is a rather telling sign of bigger things to come in the memory space. Stay Tuned.S|A
Dave Morgan
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