by Anna Filatova
03/26/2002 | 11:32 PM
As we read over here, the meeting of the JEDEC industrial committee uncovered further plans regarding the development of the mass DRAM market. JEDEC representative announced that they may approve DDR400 standard in the current DDR I specification or may not.
The possible cancellation of the new standard may ruin Micron and Samsung’s plans completely, as they have already started shipping the first samples of their DDR400 chips. This fact will also turn out quite upsetting for SiS and VIA, which were going to release chipsets supporting this memory type.<%BANNER[article]%>
At present the memory makers complete the final transition from SDRAM to DDR200 and DDR266, which have become mass standards already. Now that DDR333 has been approved within DDR I specification, it is regarded as mass standard until 2004 (see this news story). And after DDR333 the industry has two ways to go: DDR400 (I mean DDR SDRAM with the resulting frequency of 400MHz DDR) within DDR I or DDR II specs.
Now that this info has been disclosed, we can suppose that JEDEC will turn to support of DDR400/DDR-II (the first samples are expected in the end of 2002 or beginning of 2003). However, it doesn’t at all mean that the memory makers will not produce DDR400/DDR I modules, and the chipset makers will not support them. They may simply disregard the absence of JEDEC standard approval :) In conclusion I could only add that Samsung and Micron haven’t yet commented on this information.