DDR3 at the Intel Developer Forum

Bit Tech spotted some DDR3 memory at the IDF in Beijing. Performance figures weren't available yet (they should follow tomorrow or on Wednesday) but they did had a chat with Hynix and Samsung.

Hynix was showing off 2GB DDR3 modules, these chips run at 1066MHz and have "loose" timings of 7-7-7. Contrary to talks from Nanya and other memory makers, Hynix claims their DDR3 memory is getting pretty good yields.

And here's a snip of what Samsung's spokesperson had to say:

A quick stroll around the corner and I bumped into Samsung who offered a greater depth of detail: it isn’t making its DRAMs at 70nm like this poor hack was lead to believe was a standard. Instead Samsung is sticking with good old 80nm as it costs just as much to make the memory chips larger for the same density as DDR2.

Samsung's spokesperson explained that because of the increment in speed, and greater bit-depth prefetch (upped from four to eight), this means that you need bigger cells with larger silicon gaps to cope: making the overall die bigger. Samsung won't move to 70nm until DDR3 saturation reaches a critical point of one million units and didn’t expect to be there until Q2 next year.

So, while new tech will not only sell for a premium it’ll be more expensive because it either requires a new process or a more silicon, depending on what modules you buy.