Market not to shift to DDRII in 2004, and the hot breath of Rambus

Memory analyst Nam Huying Kim claims that it is unlikely that Intel will be able to shift the market in 2004 to DDR2 memory.

According to Kim, the major Dramurai have a good set of plans in place, and he describes Intel’s own attempts to promote DDR-2 as an admirable job. But there are some elements of the DDR-2 memory platform that still have to be put in place.

He said that Intel’s validation site doesn’t yet show any system level DIMM module validation yet, while its own DDR-2 chipsets don’t come out until the second quarter. And usually it’s a year or so after a release of this type of nature before there’s widespread take up.

Changes have to be made at the motherboard design level and that means those manufacturers have to move to support DDR-2, with a subsequent cost to them. Kim said that they may be hesitant to jump after previous problems.

On the other side is Rambus, they are going to launch their XDR memory this week. Rambus wants Intel to endorse XDR memory as the mainstream memory of the future. Kim says that in performance terms XDR is able to thrash any future version of DDR.

Source: The Inquirer