ESTEEMED COLLEAGUE, Theo Valich says FB-DIMMS are on their way out. But memory distribution kingpin Kingston Technology begs to differ.

The basic reason is that many servers that use FB-DIMMS won’t be retired for a little while yet, so even though the memories won’t be going into new systems, there will remain an aftermarket

“You read some of the publications saying it’s dead but it’s fine and there’s a still a lot of life in the upgrade market,” said Marc Bernier, who works in research and development at Kingston. “It can easily go on for another two years.”

What else is driving memory sales? Power-crazed gamers and 4GB Vista configs, naturally, but on the server side, it’s all about virtualisation, says Bernier, with VMware consolidation projects meaning that hosts get a memory top-up to deal with growing workloads. µ