New 30nm DDR3 DRAM

Samsung's 30nm DDR3 DRAM boosts speeds, cuts power consumption

Engadget:

Press Release:

 

WOW! Great news. Dang, and I just updated most of my machines to 8GB or 16GB because RAM was so cheap. Laptops will get an upgrade first of course due to power consumption. Wonder how much better battery life this will render on the ULV machines?

 

Great find. I wonder how these will compare to current kingston hyperx 1600 and the 1600/1866 pnp series

 

But, is it 30nm 'class'?

See:
Samsung?s 3x DDR3 SDRAM ? 4F2 or 6F2? You Be the Judge..


See:
Inside Samsung's 30-nm-class, 'green' DDR3 SDRAM

 

Might help my Latitude 13's abysmal battery life and help the IGP.

 

Will I be able to install them on my L701x with no problems, since my DDR3 are running at 1333mhz?
I read that the sticks are running at 1600mhz, would my motherboard automatically adjust the RAM frequency?

 

I don't see it helping laptops much as they are fixed at 1.5v.

 

This?

10. Char.

 

Llano chipset laptops support DDR3L-1333/1666 1.35v.

Not sure is 30nm is 1.35v or less?

 

Well a smaller process gets the large chunk of its power saving from operating at a lower voltage.

Any current laptop gives a fixed 1.5v supply and a supplier wont want to sell modules if there is a large chunk of machines that wont work with it.

Something designed for 1.35v or lower wont like having 1.5v shoved through it.

 

Then most likely Llano laptops ship with 30nm 1.35v DDR3L-1333/1600 pre-installed.

 

Maybe, but it needs to be able to handle 1.5v ram too incase it is replaced.

You dont want a situation where something physically fits but does not work electrically.

 

I don't think the manufacturers would care if it 'physically fits but does not work electrically'.

They'll be glad to sell you the 'proper' components for your system (again).

 

If they really did not care then DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 would not be keyed differently.

 

Meaker, that is not the same thing.

I'm thinking more along the lines of DDR2/3 RAM modules and Apple DDR2/3 RAM 'Magic' Modules.

 

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W=AV. Voltage isn't the only thing that goes into the power use equation... they likely lowered the amperage needed even at the same voltage.

 

let's hope so cause there was some plans for 1.25w ddr3

if they provide similar timing that my HyperX does for les W of power they are sold

 

True, but there are other factors and design points that will counter that if you feed in a higher voltage than its been designed for.

Also in a laptop with only 2-4 dimms this is going to have a very VERY small impact.

If you look at reviews of some 1.35v dimms (desktop) you will see the power savings are small, most of this is from the reduced voltage on the IMC which shares the same voltage.

 

In ULV laptops where at idle it's only drawing ~ 7W, an extra 0.5W can be beneficial. My M11x even at idle with Intel IGP active idles at about 7W, was more when I had an HDD then switched to SSD and gained 45mins+ real use battery life. I wouldn't mind an additional 30mins!

 

Well idle numbers don't really mean much IMO, but try taking a stick of ram out, only running one and see how much extra battery life you get.

Thats going to be a 50% saving on your ram power usage.

 

TO be honest, a single manufacturer like Samsung has little say in the way things are standardised. Also, it doesn't make sense for them to make a product which wouldn't work anyway. Most likely what will happen is that they are also capable of running at 1.5V (nothing to say they can't) and the chipset will default to the highest voltage needed (much like how RAM speed is dictated by the lowest common denominator). That way you could mix and match like you can normally. PC business is all about standardisation really, you have a lot of guts to claim that your product is good enough to force people to buy new hardware just to use it.

I'd take this video with a pinch of salt. If you read between the lines they're scewing the figures as much as they possibly can. Sure, their memory might only use half the power of the current stuff, but the thing is that RAM accounts for a tiny proportion of the power used in computing systems. Esentially what they seem to be claiming is that all servers are made from 100% RAM or something to the same effect. I honestly don't know why they bother with adverts like that seeing as anyone who maintains server systems would instantly be able to see straight through it.

 

lol, good point... Out of curiosity I may do that test.

 

This exactly.

There is no way they are releasing RAM that is supposed to be for 1.35v but will start up and run with way too much voltage.

This is very good news for FSB overclocking, am I right? At least with core 2 duos...

 

@funky monk

That advert was quite amusing. They were comparing their ram to ddr2, which has been phased out mostly at this point. If you look at comparisons to other ddr3, you see less than 10% power consumption gain.

Honestly, I'd be more satisfied if they came out with an hdd that consumed less wattage, or gpus/cpus were to get more efficient.

 

Many SSD's offer significant power advantages over hard drives. With GPU's integrated into the GPU with switchable graphics you should get considerably better life. Not sure if they can draw much less power and offer decent 3D performance.

 

3d power consumption is worse because you have the dedicated chip and the integrated chip on the go.

 

The main way to reduce heat and power consumption is to simply run at lower voltages and at a smaller scale. If they could finally get their act together and research some more into graphene then that would also put us leaps and bounds ahead of anything we're at at the moment.

 

Seems this would be something AMD would want to do to super leapfrog Intel.

 

Wondering if this is DDR3 30nm?

Adata’s XPG DDR3L 1600G SO-DIMM

 

Nemix77, possibly - but it could also be just the low voltage version too:

See:
DDR3 SDRAM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Are these 30nm ddr3 out yet?

 

Yeah I'm trying to find them too, they're are suppose available at NewEgg, Amazon, etc..posted a month ago:

Samsung puts out first 30nm DDR3 RAM upgrades for PCs | Electronista

 

Dual Channel:
$67.16 4GB DDR3-1600
$116.18 8GB DDR3-1600

Single:
$44.02 2GB DDR-1600
$67.16 4GB DDR3-1600

From Amazon.

 

So how does this work? 20 % faster than the 60nm. Does this mean 1600MHz x 1.20 = 1920MHz or is it more complicated than that?

And 2/3 of the power consumption of 60nm. How much watt do 2x4GB use?

 

Next to nothing. Probably one or two at most. Unless you have a super low power netbook or were gonna upgrade anyway then I really wouldn't bother.

 

See the following pdf for DDR3 power consumption calculations for 1GB of 2-rank 1067 DDR3. Micron had a 78nm DRAM process when this tech note was written.

http://download.micron.com/pdf/technotes/ddr3/TN41_01DDR3 Power.pdf

For this particular usage example, they state:

Background 'Leakage' power consumption ~113mW
Activation costs an additional ~123mW
Read/Write/Termination costs an additional ~200mW
Power consumption per device ~436
Power consumption for all 4 devices ~1.7W
​

Now, power consumption doesn't necessarily scale linearly with process shrinks, so I don't know how power consumption would scale from 78nm->40nm->30nm. But at least this gives some idea of power consumption. Could anyone that understands this stuff chime in?

 

Sorry if this has already been asked. Will this be able to be installed into our computers running 60nm/ whatever DDR3 is now?

 

Your mobo/bios must be able to support the lower voltages called for.

Some smarter mobos read the spd before powering up the memory, some just hit the memory with 'full power'.

In any case, it's damned nice to finally see desktop ddr3 coming out that pulls approx 500mw per 4 Gb. This is pretty close to the original design spec for ddr3 (some 7 years ago).

Contrast this to ddr2 that pulls as much as 12 watts (!!!) per 4Gb.

 

What does Extreme Low voltage mean, 1.35v?

I cannot find a PDF or any info for the Jedec timings for these at DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1066.

Edit:

At the current prices, the 30 nm Samsung's are really expensive compared to G. Skills DDR3-1600 and even Kingston's HyperX DDR3-1600 with heat spreaders.

This 30 nm upgrade better give me another 30 minutes to 1 hour more battery life over my current 46nm Samsung's.

 

it's unlikely you're going to see that kind of battery life improvement.

 

Okay then it's still at least good for Llano laptops.

Anyhow, there's just something about Samsung, ram and SSD's related to Samsung that I like..not sure what it is?

 

Well, it will be 'good' for everyone but don't expect miracles like 20-25% more battery life.

 

Nice. Thank you. It's good to know at least the names of these 30nm ddr3's. I've been googling "30nm ddr3" for the past 1 month hoping to find the actual product name.

Now, it seems that they aren't released yet. In the meantime, how can we find out if they work in our specific laptop?