Is the FB-DIMM as dead as a dodo? No it's kicking, Pat

FULLY BUFFERED DIMMS are some of Intel's favourite whipping boys in our stories, though nearly not as much as the Good Ship Itanic.

The added latency, with its awful effect on Sandra and Everest benchmark results, as well as the AMB chips heat & power intake, do seem to take priority over FB's separate read and write ports, or the ability to put 16 DIMMs on a dual-socket Xeon 1U gizmo. Well OK, 16 DIMMs is 200W for the memory alone.

While I don't exactly see much in the future for the current FB-DIMM platform beyond 2009, several vendors have already started producing new DIMMs meant for the dual-FSB1600 Stoakley/Seaburg dual-socket platform later this year - a platform which you could see all over the show.

Nanya, one of the less covered memory vendors here, has shown a little gem. The new lower voltage 1.5V DDR2-800 CL5 FB-DIMMs consume a bit less power, some 30%, and reduces heat by up to 30 C, which is a big deal, yet offers increased speed to provide in-sync operation for the new FSB. The capacities will ultimately be the same as for the current batch of FB-DIMMs: up to 4 GB per module, later possibly 8 GB.

Coupled with the Seaburg chipset's supposedly vastly improved latency, this should somewhat improve the overall memory performance on the dual Xeon - at least till Intel and/or Nvidia come out with high-speed, overclockable "enthusiast" dual-socket dual-FSB Xeon chipset using normal DDR2/3 memory. The grapevine says that either of these vendors should have such a chipset before the year's end. µ