DDR4 May Replace Mobile Memory For Less 145
Lucas123 writes "The upcoming shift from Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) RAM to its successor, DDR4, will herald a significant boost in both memory performance and capacity for data center hardware and consumer products alike. Because of the greater density, 2X performance and lower cost, the upcoming specification and products will for the first time mean DDR may be used in mobile devices instead of LPDDR. Today, mobile devices use low-power DDR (LPDDR) memory, the current iteration of which uses 1.2v of power. While the next generation of mobile memory, LPDDR3, will further reduce that power consumption (probably by 35% to 40%), it will also likely cost 40% more than DDR4 memory."
Awesome. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
I gave up talking about "need" when it comes to mobile phones long ago. It is really about "want" (for all but a very few folks who have a real need for work - most who think they "need" it for work, don't). It took me awhile to move from an old dumb phone to a smart phone. But I was finally honest with myself - and damn it I wanted one. I got one and was thrilled with all the things I can do with it. I still wholeheartedly consider smart phones a luxury - but I am glad I can afford one and finally talked myself into parting with the money and monthly payment for a data plan (I'm sort of a cheapskate). The whole family of four has them now, three of us on our second generation of them.
Go ahead and laugh. Your phone does more than I need too. But it doesn't do more than what I want.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
Fast and cheap are well enough, but cool and reliable are important factors too.
From TFS, it looks like it may run cool, but I'll wait with the hallelujah until I've seen something about reliability. Especially because with die shrinks for flash, reliability has gone way down from the last generation - I hope that won't be the case with RAM too.
Re:1.2V of power? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not nearly as much as it needs -2: Stupid.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Reliability is the reason I havent gone SSD yet. Every time I'm about to upgrade I read the reviews on newegg of some guy losing all his data
If 'some guy losing all of his data' is your reason for not buying an SSD, does it also stop you from buying a hard disk?
Ya no shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Also there's the fact that the people who post things like that are the whiny ones who had problems. I've never posted my SSD experiences before, because I'm happy, but here they are:
I have 3 256GB SSDs, one in my laptop, two in my desktop. All have worked without flaw since their purchase 11 months ago. Thus I never felt the need to go whine online about them. I've suffered no failures, no data loss. They just work.
Now, do SSDs die? Sure. So do HDDs. In terms of personal HDDs I've had about 5 fail on me over the course of my 20ish years using computers. At work, I've seen hundreds fail. Some are dead on arrival, some fail within hours of install, some fail after months or a year, some are still going strong 10+ years later.
SSDs are fine. You need to back up your data, but then that is true of anything. If you don't back up your data and have never lost anything to HDD failure that is luck, not because HDDs don't fail.
If you want an SSD the only issue should be cost. They are expensive, about $1/GB at best and as much as $3/GB for some of the really high performance/lots of write cycles stuff. HDDs are more like $0.08/GB. However if the price is acceptable, then get one. Back up the data on it to a HDD (since HDDs are cheaper, and a different technology) and you are fine. Could it die? Sure, if it does, RMA it, get a new one, and go back to what you were doing.