The JEDEC solid state technology association has published the specifications of the forthcoming Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) memory standard.
DDR3 memory promises improvements in performance and power consumption over the previous DDR2 and older standards. The new technology operates at 1.5V and offers an increased operating temperature range. The DD2 standard operates at 2.5V and DD1 used 1.8 volts.
The memory standard also doubles the pre-fetch buffer from 4-bit in DDR2 to 8-bit in DDR3.
The new memory modules will especially shine in applications that require large amounts of memory to be transferred. The decreases in power consumption also will help increase battery life.
In a joint press release with the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), Intel touted the technology as an improvement for both low power mobile devices as well as high end systems that will be used for gaming, video encoding or 3D visualisations.
JEDEC expects that DDR3 memory will feature modules ranging from 512Mb to 8Gb. The chips will operate at transfer rates ranging from 800 to 1,600 million transfers per second.
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