In a recent website review, Samsung, Micron, and Hynix all show-cased their 2Gb DDR2 product offerings. Big die for sure, and pricey. (In fact, Samsung's first 2Gb was in 80-nm ground rules

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and Micron's was in 78nm, even bigger die.) <Samsung's is now its 60-nm process, Hynix in its 66-nm process, and Micron's is in its next generation process. Dense DIMMs for servers need dense chips. We have all seem the difficulty within the industry in bringing the FB DIMM to market, which was specifically designed to solve the "addressable DRAM memory subsystem limitation" that we faced few years ago. Dense DIMMs with next-generations DRAM chips and 2H and 4H stacks, which make for very dense DIMMs, up to 16GB/DIMM, are a way around the signaling issues that arise from having too many smaller DIMMs on a single channel. Sometimes it is worth it to pay exorbitant prices for next generation DRAMs to keep your server product line alive for another year or two.

But these 2Gb DRAMs are just toys for now, as the industry is just now moving in earnest from 512Mb to 1Gb DRAMs, as almost all producers are moving their main production to their 70-75nm nodes. That being the case, it is just a matter time until most DRAMs are +/- 70nm, and 1Gb is the volume runner —look for sometime in 2Q08. With shrinks come higher speed distributions, higher density (and smaller) chips, and lower costs (eventually).

Today the mix of 512Mb DRAMs to 1Gb, in terms of MB shipments, is about 15:1 (July 2007 shipments were 718M of 512M, and 26M of 1Gb). But 1Gb has ramped in line with 70-75nm processing, by 3Q08; the mix can be expected to be about 50-50 for the whole industry. Samsung and Hynix management are now saying they will be 40% 1Gb MB shipment by year-end 2007, and though they are the leaders, it is indicative of how fast the product mix can turnover once key processing milestones and price points are achieved.

For their 2Gb DRAMs, both Samsung and Hynix are offering 800Mb/sec (= 400MHz clock), but so far, Micron, offers only 667. Long traces and overly large die size, plus maybe some design issues are the culprits. With lots of 512M and 1Gb DDR2-1066s around and about, it is certainly only a matter of time before 2Gb's at 800Mb/sec are widely available.