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When will DDR3 become the mainstream choice?

by Scott Bicheno on 20 February 2009, 07:00

Tags: Target Components

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Ramming speed

Last week we brought you the news that Castleford based distie Target Components - the exclusive distributor for Biostar in the UK - will be stocking Biostar socket AM3 motherboards by the end of this month.

Given that the latest AM3 CPUs are backwardly compatible with AM2+ boards, the main reason anyone would have to buy one of these new boards would be because they wanted to use DDR3 memory. So we spoke to a couple of product managers at Target to see what the DDR3 market looks like these days.

When we spoke to AMD's Kevin Lensing after the launch of the AM3 CPUs, he indicated that price parity between DDR3 and DDR2 was the key factor influencing mainstream adoption of the former. So we started by asking memory product manager Mahmoud Madaci (pictured below, top, with colleague Glen Rhodes) about the current price of DDR3.

"DDR3 is being oversupplied by manufacturers and price has dropped tremendously in the past two or three months," said Madaci. "This is also because demand hasn't picked up as much as expected. The prices of DDR1 and DDR2 have doubled in the past two months. Now DDR3 is roughly 40 percent more expensive then DDR2."