AMD Rumored to Skip DDR2 for DDR3 or XDR

AMD Rumored to Skip DDR2 for DDR3 or XDR
Posted :: Apr 22, 2005 by Haggs

According to an industry insider report from CoolTechZone, AMD, the world's second largest chip maker may skip DDR2 support and proceed straight to DDR3 or Rambus's XDR. (On a side note, Sony Corporation has licensed the XDR memory interface for applications with the PS3 Cell processor). Possible reasons for skipping DDR2 include high latency issues, higher costs, and relatively low performance gain over the present DDR standard. On the other hand, Intel, the world's leading chip maker has already begun supporting the new DDR2 memory, and is likely to continue to do so for some time. If AMD does skip DDR2 altogether, it my face a shortage of supply from memory manufacturers that have chosen to supply Intel with DDR2 instead. Known issues with DDR3 prototypes include similar high latency problems, but these problems will be compensated with a much higher bandwidth than DDR2.

At this point, the speculations are only rumors and should be taken with a grain of salt. Keep following the news for more information, because the selection of a RAM standard is a very important issue for chip makers and computer enthusiasts everywhere.