DDR3 will have very loose latencies

The DDR3 technology will soon make its entrance on the PC market and the new RAM technology promises to bring considerably higher frequencies than the DDR2 technology. Nothing but expected and a classic way of improving memory performance. Unfortunately, there is another, just as predictable, trend with the memory latencies becoming less and less aggressive. At Fudzilla they’ve published an article about the DDR3 technology and its specified memory latencies. They conclude that the base speed, DDR3-800, will be specified to 5-5-5 (CL5) latencies, which is hardly impressive when compared to optimized DDR2 memory.

The DDR3 technology will scale up to 1600MHz and there it will be working with CL9 memory latencies, far from exciting. There are bits about DDR3 that are very positive though, like lower power consumption, but we’re eager to see how the memory manufacturers will optimize the latencies of the DDR3 circuits. There seems to be plenty of room for it at least.