Comments Locked

9 Comments

Back to Article

  • 1008anan - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link

    Any speculation on how power efficient DDR4-RS might be?
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link

    I don't have any... I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that you'll need new CPUs to even work with DDR4-RS in the first place, as if it's like the previous DDR -> DDR2 -> DDR3 transitions there won't be backwards compatibility. If my assumption is correct, by the time we see DDR4-RS in ultrathin products, we'll all be running Haswell or later CPUs (or the AMD equivalent). In that case, the CPU efficiency will also be substantially higher, but I suppose when we're idling at 5W and less on laptops, every little bit helps.

    PS: Funny thing, googling "DDR4-RS", the top two hits are my short article and Micron's press release, neither of which will tell you anything about DDR4-RS. :-\
  • JFish222 - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link

    Any word on if they can be mixed w/ standard sodimms or if any other board / memory controller requirements exist?

    ie: By an ultrabook now, drop these in later?

    I wonder if the bios needs to be "RS" aware to accomodate the new refresh cycle rate.

    Thanks!
  • JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link

    I spoke with Micron some more today and have some additional information on the memory and some other items. Basically, DDR3L-RS should work in any device without any extra work on the part of the laptop/tablet/whatever manufacturer.
  • Impulses - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link

    Wow, so essentially this should be standard on the better ultrabooks/tablets coming out early next year? Win 8's release would go over much better if it was accompanied by Haswell and a lot of other tech we'll be seeing by next year IMO, early Win 8 concepts (specially anything on Clover Trail) just feel like there's too many comprises being made...
  • epobirs - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link

    Microsoft's x86 version of the Surface tablet and a number of other announced products are all not due to ship until several months after Windows 8. I think you can guess why.

    Hopefully this means they're seeing very good results from engineering samples of Haswell and that made them favor the delay.
  • code65536 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link

    So, what does "RS" stand for? I know "L" means low-voltage. But RS?
  • JarredWalton - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link

    Reduced Standby.
  • ssj3gohan - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - link

    Here's a breakdown of 1.5V DDR3 (regular) memory power consumption on an Ivy Bridge system running the memory in ACPI C3, DDI6:

    http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/8217/fluffy2-...

    Very roughly 0.4W with 2 SODIMMs installed. Micron promises about a 5X improvement in power consumption, i.e. this figure goes down to sub-100mW figures.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now