We’ve done a couple FAQs and Q&As, but we haven’t painted a clear, by-the-numbers picture yet of what DDR4 really has to offer beyond DDR3. On the desktop side the lower power consumption is offset somewhat by the fact that the only platform that supports it starts chugging power the instant overclocking gets involved, while 16GB DIMMs (one of the key advantages of DDR4) aren’t expected to be available until 2015.
That leaves us with performance. A lot of users are concerned that the increased timings on DDR4 make it inferior to DDR3 at similar speeds, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story. While DDR2 and DDR3 were architecturally very similar and took some time to separate, DDR4 is host to a few internal architectural changes that affect overall latency and performance. Those changes allow it to see benefits over DDR3 right out of the gate.
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DDR4 starts at very high speeds with room to scale higher, and at those entry level speeds, it’s faster and more capable than its predecessor in almost every test. Mainstream DDR4 actually winds up with lower overall latency and higher bandwidth than mainstream DDR3.
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