Hardware DDR4: What we can Expect

Why?

 

We can expect another upgrade cycle.

 

Sadly, wrong.

At the begining of the new generation, the past one woul keep the prices intact, then factories stop making them and prices sky rocket, look for DDR 2 now, its really expensive, no wonder about DDR. so the same will happen with DDR3.

The best time to buy RAM its when it becomes mainstream and the standard for every market, no matter the price, it will be the cheapest price you will get.

 

True that. I've just gone from 4GB 1600 to 16GB 1333 and guess what, it's not any slower!

 

From my experience in the past, and today, what has always made the biggest difference is the amount of ram, not the speed.

Would you rather have 1gig of DDR3, or 4 gigs of DDR2?

 

Ahh, I was approaching it from the enthusiast point of view in that I thought you'd rather have, say, 8GB of DDR2 than 4GB of DDR3 (though of course for some applications you would).

 

It's been the same story for every ram generation. I don't expect anything new from this one.

DDR3 is cheap > DDR4 is announced > 3 gets even cheaper > 4 is released and is very expensive > demand for 4 expands, price goes down> demand for 3 diminishes, price goes up > price of 4 goes down


repeat with DDR5

It's always the same thing. Always buy ram just before the next generation takes off and it will always be cheap.

 

Speed isn't a big issue for me, but capacity is.

I would rather have mid-range 8Gb kit for 2Gb prices or less than expensive mega fast ram.

DROP THE PRICES ALREADY!!!

 

>exactly, I couldn't have said it better

 

Something I have wondered is well back in the PC133 era I use to see memory that was stacked two high and sometimes higher and Im wondering why cant we do that now? why must it be a single row on each side of the pcb board? couldnt we go two high or more to increase capacity on a single dimm? we do it on SO-Dimms why not the normal dims? wouldnt this make it a bit cheaper then using high capacity chips to maintain that single row?

 

so, lemme get this straight, we're gonna have stupid fast ram, thats gonna be stupid expensive instead of just really fast ram thats STILL overpriced? ok, lovely.

 

Cool stuff, can't wait for it. As for the amount vs speed argument, DDR3 isnt so expensive anymore, why not buy a ton of fast RAM. Best of both worlds

 

Same here

 

No one said anything about overpriced. That's entirely determined by the cost of production, yields and tooling changes over the next 5 years!

This is true for this generations CPUs, but considering that Intel now appears to share at least some L3 cache with its graphics core on Sandy Bridge and has cut back on the "2MB per core" rule with Nehalem/Lynnfield, it might make memory access more necessary. But, I doubt it - like CPU frequency we've got to a point where more is less and less noticeable.

 

2gb of ddr2 800 OCZ reaper ram when i bought it 60 bucks. thats reasonable to me. it was fast at the time and the faster speeds hadn't come out yet.

DDR3 has been out for a while now and 2gb still costs over 60 bucks. not so reasonable, but liveable. now 4gb is the norm, being required for running some games at higher levels and playable frame rates, so that makes it a minimum of 80 bucks. which i suppose makes it more cost effective per Gb, but i was expecting it to come down in price even further. Idk, maybe im just out of sync with the world of computers.

 

Admittedly you bought DDR2 when it was at the industries lowest for a decade after massive overproduction that saw several DRAM manuf. go bankrupt. It'll never hit that low again unfortunately for us. Not to mention inflation always adds...

 

i'm not exactly sure what that had to do with my post haha, but ya that as decently reasonable.

remember tho, just because something is "the norm" it doesn't mean its right. i have 2gb for my gaming system and i have yet to use over 80% of it. i do run 32 bit windows 7 (because 64 bit is so damn inflated for no reason whatsoever) but 4gb is overall unnecessary if you only do gaming, on a 32 bit system.


before anyone says anything that the memory usage in 64 bit windows is fine, no, it isn't. i got my 32 bit setup to use about 220mb of ram. i disabled a LOT of processes to get it that low. i disabled the exact same processes and more in 64 bit yet it consumed over 500mb. that is not acceptable. i'm mainly a linux user and my 64 bit linux setup, with more services and graphical enhancements, uses approximately 200MB.
windows 7 is considerably better than anything microsoft has ever made but it still has a LOT of room for improvement

 

When I looked at buying the OCZ Reaper PC2-8500 new 4GB cost £115!!!! mad money considering how old it is! I'm just glad the Bit-Tech marketplace is here, saved me alot of pennies

Edit: why would you not want your software to use the resources available to it? I shunts it all to HDD as soon as anything major kicks off, so its no like its 'stealing' RAM. And Supreme Commander easily uses 3GB of RAM when using the Sybian AI when set to 7AI with a unit cap of 2000...

 

That's because Windows 7 uses the memory its given dynamically. If memory is there it dumps stuff into it so it's faster to start, but if other programs need the memory it removes the cache and makes it available to the programs requirements. By stopping processes you're actually slowing down the machine - it's not necessary any more. Imo Windows 7 and whatever Linux distro cannot directly be compared as they do different things for different users.

 

no but see, i disabled all prefetching and superfetching, which is why i know they did something wrong if the memory usage is still THAT high. i am referring to memory usage fresh from booting btw. also, KDE in linux has a form of prefetching. it works a little different (and not as well) but since most linux programs are only a few KB, it doesn't take very long to load them anyway. i've found myself literally sitting there for a good 10+ seconds for windows to load something like internet explorer. i can load a video editor in linux in less time than that. which fyi, reminds me that NTFS is horribly outdated and altho it has the most features of any filesystem, its the slowest and currently the only modern one that still requires defragmentation. mac, linux, freebsd, and solaris are all way ahead in terms of hard drive performance.