The stick of RAM you see above is something new. Very new. It’s the first functional DDR4 I’ve found. DDR4 comes with some interesting new features. The most obvious of them is the connector, they added a few dozen pins and also made the center of the PCB stick down further. This makes for better contact with the socket and reduces issues when motherboards flex while installing the RAM.
We have a number of pics to share, so hit Read More to see them, and of course to read more about Microns new stuff!
We’ve all seen pictures of DDR4 before, the initial press releases were something like a year ago. This is different, this is functional. Below you’ll first find an IC shot of the DDR4, and then some of it in action.
IC wise the look is the same, though the voltage is far lower. 1.2 V is standard for DDR4, as opposed to 1.5 V for DDR3 or 1.35 V for DDR3L. This translates to power savings and cooler running temperatures. DDR4 also brings in some new sleep states as well as removing the need to constantly refresh the RAM cells to keep them awake.
Here we have two systems, on the right is an Intel Developer Platform box, on the left is a DDR4 packet sniffer. Sadly I can’t tell you anything about the Intel box, it’s under the NDA from hell. The packet sniffer is pretty cool though, we’ll get to it shortly.
Up top is the DDR4, it then plugs into the packet sniffer board, which then plugs into the motherboard itself. Impressively you still get full speeds despite the extra complexity. The blue ribbon cables lead to the main brainbox for the sniffer. It outputs to a monitor, here’s what the Micron DDR4 was running while we were there:
Pretty impressive stuff.
As always Crucial is planning to make DDR4 ranging from basic entry level (2133MHz!) stuff up through kits dedicated to overclocking and benching, I expect those to be over 3000MHz. It’s going to be a couple years before we see DDR4 in desktops according to Micron, servers will start using it somewhat sooner as they’re more dedicated to power savings than your average desktop user.
Micron also showed us their new M500 Series SSDs, they come in 2.5″, mSATA, and long thin form factors. The 2.5″ drive has a full metal case, it’s very solid. It’s also a bit thinner than the average SSD, so micron gives you a shim in case your case’s 2.5″ drive bay doesn’t like the thinner drive.
Inside is plenty of Micron MLC flash, possibly the most amazing part is the price. The 960GB (lots of over-provisioning to keep reliability and speeds up) drive is expected to cost less than $600!
The mSATA drives have a very cool and unique feature as well, here’s a pic first though:
See that double row of capacitors across the bottom? That’s enough power for the drive to write everything in it’s write cash to the flash chips in the event of a power loss. Most drives don’t have enough stored energy to dump the cache to flash, resulting in data loss if you lose power at the wrong time. The long thin form factor drives have this feature as well.
