That is precisely what Intel has tried to convince the rest of the world of during IDF, it has namely demonstrated its coming Bearlake series of chipsets, where DDR3-SDRAM will be one of the most interesting additions. The Bearlake chipsets with DDR3 support is expected to be launched during the second quarter of 2007 and according to Intel, DDR3 is better than DDR2 in every possible way. You might think this is a bit obvious considering it’s a new technology, but when DDR2 was new it did not perform according to expectations, sometimes actually even worse than DDR1.
According to the presentation Intel made at IDF we shouldn’t have to worry about this when it comes to DDR3 as Intel has stated that the new technology brings lower power consumption, higher frequencies and at the same time more aggressive latencies. The latter is going to be really interesting to follow, Intel namely claims that the latencies are affected by the module’s clock frequency which is correct. But the DDR2 technology will probably mature even further until DDR3 arrives so we should perhaps wait a bit before we make in big assumptions. Intel seems to have great faith in DDR3 though and since AMD also seems a lot more keen on DDR3 than it was on DDR2 things are looking quite promising.
“According to Samsung’s schedule, Samsung DDR3-800/1066 will be available in the market in Q207, and DDR3-1666 is a quarter later in Q307. DDR3 for mobile platform will be introduced in Q108 with DDR3- 800/1066, and DDR3-1333 will be released in Q109.”
