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Price of DDR2 tumbles again
THE TIME HAS COME time to finally break the 32-bit memory limit. You'll have noticed that, as DDR2 prices dropped further, there were more entrants offering inexpensive DDR2 DIMMs using denser 1 Gbit dies. This gives you 2 GB per standard unbuffered desktop DIMM, or 4 GB per dual channel kit.
According to the most recent die prices quoted by sources like Digitimes and others, you could the 16 dies needed for such a 2 GB DIMMs for as little as US$ 40 now, if you bought them in dozens of thousands of course. Add the PCB, assembly and other usual costs, and just look at online offers right now on, say, pricewatch.com: a dual-channel 4 GB kit of two 2 GB DIMMs is yours for around US$ 150. Make it double, and you got an 8 GB large memory monster for some US$ 300!
That's just some 10 per cent of the cost of a typical mid-high class PC that would use this memory - like a quad-core Yorkfield with Nvidia 780i SLI chipset, or quad-core Phenom with AMD 790FX basic Crossfire rig. And, this cost is expected to continue going down as the die price pressure persists due to lack of demand from the expected "golden resource hog", Windows Vista.
Now, there is use for this even you're still on 32-bit WinXP or Vista, that use only around 3GB: simply, declare the upper 5GB of that RAM as a RAM drive that, during the system use, has the whole XP and apps loading to and from there, saving you quite a bit of time. A proper RAM disk applet can always do a write-back of any OS or application code changes - which shoudn't happen too often on a decent OS, which Windows might not be anyway.
And, once you go to the 64-bit OS level, you got as much memory as any PC application out today could possibly managed then. However, don't expect the same high-density, low-price benefits on the DDR3 until later in next year, when it moves to even higher semicon processes, beyond 65 nm - right in time for the Nehalems? µ
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Lots of the posts here seem to lack research. There are solutions out there that use ram drives and have enough battery power to run for 10 hours when the PC is turned off. BUT they also have the ability to copy data to the laptop drive you attach to it each time you turn off the PC. This means that as long as you don't physically pull out the power cable it will boot up pretty much instantly and you won't losse any data. If you do turn off the power then it will just have to load from the hard drive into the memory (so taking no longer than it would currently take with just a drive).

Also in reply to voshkin - do your research - most ram drives connect by using a sata cable, so even the bios sees it as a hard drive, meaning they are fully compatible with windows, osx and linux.

I can't wait for the new I-RAM drive to arrive - fast storage for the masses at a very low price
But then you could never turn off your PC...
For 32bit Windows OSes, you can *supposedly* (I have yet to try it, I need 2GB more RAM) enable PAE, which will give you access to all your RAM.

"PAE is an Intel-provided memory address extension that enables support of greater than 4 GB of physical memory for most 32-bit (IA-32) Intel Pentium Pro and later platforms."

It works similar to the old page-swapping trick in DOS.

So those of you lucky enough to have 4+ GB, try it out and let us know how it worked.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx
32-bit xp can access more than 3gb ram, it just can't assign more than 3gb to a single process. you'd also be limited to 3gb per ram drive you create, just enough for a xp install and one game. Windows can address a large amount of memory though, you could put a large swap file in the ram disk, which is known to work well.
While the 32bit CPU and OS have support (via PAE) to access >=4G, the motherboard might not.
A lot of motherboards claim to support 4G but they actually report 3G to the OS.
so if you installed windows to a ram drive, you could then operate a computer w/out an hdd?
..an awful lot of the DRAM you'll find these days is already below 65nm - typically 55 or 50nm (or other values depending on how the manufacturer is quoting the process, e.g. min gate length) - memory design/production tends not to follow the main-stream ASIC process sizes directly.
How will your drive work, if the OS cannot address the RAM in the first place?
nice idea, but do some research beforehand.
It's not an entirely fair comparison, since RDRAM was a complete change of design, but the situation is the same. Why go for DDR3 now when there is a perfectly adequate and dirt cheap alternative available?

Unless there is a significant change in price of DDR3 (downwards) or DDR2 (upwards) then DDR3 is dead. People will end up waiting till the next memory technology supersedes that.