As we revealed in early February this year, numerous developers and vendors of server equipment planned to validate PC3200 aka DDR400 memory for their needs. Now I learnt over EBNews that JEDEC will cast a vote to officially adopt PC3200 standard for servers.

Presently there is no standard PC3200 memory modules with ECC (error correction coding), a feature that is widely used in server applications. As a result, vendors do not want to adopt such memory for their devices because they need highest possible reliability provided only by ECC. JEDEC already have preliminary specifications of PC3200 and will shortly ask different server vendors to vote for the final specs. Once approved, PC3200 with ECC for servers will start gaining popularity. In fact, Kingston and some other memory module companies already supply their own visions of PC3200 with ECC.

According to reports, ServerWorks have been sampling its Grand Champion SLX core-logic with PC3200 support for some time now. Intel's 875P chipset also supports ECC with PC3200 memory.

I wonder if AMD implements PC3200 support into AMD Opteron processors for servers and workstations sometime in future. Given that Athlon 64 CPUs already support PC3200 memory, I believe AMD may eventually integrate appropriate memory controller into the server chip as well. One thing I do not know is how long does it take AMD to validate new memory with server and workstation vendors. If it takes a lot of time and if DDR-II for servers is just around the corner, AMD may drop this idea, but if it takes just a number of weeks, AMD will certainly introduce Opteron CPUs with PC3200 memory controller in future.