Samsung announced that it had launched volume production of 20nm-class DRAM 1GB DDR4. The production of DDR4 has already started a little over a year ago, but at the time it was on a 512 MB chip with a process of “20nm class” between 20 and 29nm.
This new chips used for DRAM Registered 32GB that are already in production, but Samsung is targetting the 128GB sticks with TSV technology. It allows 64 gigabyte (GB), double data rate-4 (DDR4), registered dual Inline memory modules (RDIMMs) that use three dimensional (3D) “through silicon via” (TSV) package technology.
For the unbuffered types of DRAM, this chip allows 1GB produce 16 Gb capacity on single stick.
In addition to 1GB DDR4 chips, Samsung also produces chips in 20nm DDR3 512 MB and 768 MB LPDDR3.
Samsung is increasing production of its entire family of 4Gb-based DDR4 modules for systems based on the Intel's Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family. They include DDR4 RDIMMs, LRDIMMs, and ECC SODIMMs, as well as x4, x8 and x16 DDR4 chips. Later this year, Samsung will also facilitate a transition to 8Gb 32GB DDR4 modules for the high density server market.
DDR4 is currently very expensive so to think of building a homelab based on latest Xeons E5-26xx v3. And it's not the price of the CPU which doubles the cost but the memory price. As you know the latest Intel Xeon architecture is based around DDR4 which has lower power consumption and is twice as fast. I was looking the other day at the Intel ARK site, I found a Xeon E5-2630L v3 has only 55W TDP which would be great energy efficient platform for a lab -:). The prices of DDR4 are not WAF friendly however… -:)
To illustrate, there is small difference between DDR3 and DDR4 modules. The latter ones has wide space in the middle. Plus the contacts do not have the same spacing.
DDR4 prices shall fall progressively in 2015 to reach only about 10% higher price levels end of 2015 and take over DDR3 in 2016. I'm definitely looking forward for it. Currently my Haswell build is maxing at 32Gb memory and both Nehalem boxes are at 24Gb of RAM. It still does good job on my VSAN installation so far. Will see how it evolves. The whole lab drains a bit less than 500W so far, where I have another mini-whitebox based on i5 CPU with 16 Gb of RAM which does my management cluster.
I think that both Nehalem boxes aren't energy consumption friendly so those two will need to be replaced. As being said, the new Xeon E5-26xx v3 Platform is on my radar for now, because I really like the efficiency and low power, but the plans for a lab upgrade are for 2015 -:)
