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High Performance DDR2 Memory Breaks 1.25GHz

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Mar 24, 2007 11:26 AM
from the smokingly-fast dept.
Upgrades Technology Hardware
TrackinYeti writes "Performance PC Memory manufacturer, Corsair recently released a new addition to their flagship Dominator line of desktop memory, the TWIN2X2048-10000C5DF. This 2GB DDR2 memory kit features the company's DHX Dual Path Heat Xchange cooling technology, support for Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP), it includes one of Corsair's Dominator active memory coolers, and it's rated for operation at a currently industry leading 1.25GHz."
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  • Does it come with an air conditioner? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scgops (598104) on Saturday March 24 2007, @11:34AM (#18471195)
    Lovely speed, but I wonder what all that heat output will do the ambient temperature.

    • Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by klingens (147173) on Saturday March 24 2007, @11:38AM (#18471231)
      Watercooling for memory is only a question of when, not if :)

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cyrtainne (1078481)
      They better have some good case fans. Doesn't seem to be very efficient with all of that heat output. You could probably heat one room with that system - a lot of electricity being turned into heat instead of processing power - I wonder how much is lost.

      • You could probably heat one room with that system - a lot of electricity being turned into heat instead of processing power - I wonder how much is lost.

        Well, I hate to be annoying, but electricity -> processing power is not a conversion that happens, because, obviously, 'processing power' is not a form of energy. ALL the electricity that your box consumes turns into heat, noise, and some light. In terms of energy, the processing is just a byproduct of the to-heat conversion.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by master_p (608214)
      Actually, having the PC open from one side, you don't need a heater in the cold winter. And in the summer, you can use the heat to powerup a small refrigerator, so you can have your beers near to the computer.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by JRHelgeson (576325)
          There are propane powered refrigerators that heat a mixture of primarily Ammonia. After the boiler it goes to a condenser where the liquid is held under pressure. The evaporator drops the pressure, and with pressure drop the temp drops as well providing ice cold temps so you can have a propane powered fridge or freezer.

          http://www.propanerefrigerators.com/how.html [propanerefrigerators.com]

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by jawtheshark (198669) *

            Hmmm, I wasn't aware of that technique.... Still, according to the article the heat need to be dissipated from the absorber. I don't know if you could use a CPU to heat the ammonia mixture, since the CPU needs to be cooled. I guess that using it as a heat source isn't sufficient to cool it.

            A new market for cases with built-in refrigerator? ;-) If it would work, I think someone would have done it by now...

    • (Title) come with an air conditioner

      What ? Fan ?
      So I won't come with corsair's typical LEDs / LCD display / Lava Lamp ?
      Damn !

  • But does it come with ECC? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2007, @12:02PM (#18471401)
    I can't find registered ECC DDR2 faster than 667 MHz. Why?
    I was hoping my next machine would be a quad core with 800 MHz DDR2 and ECC.
    Much as my current machine is PC3200 DDR with registered ECC. No sense throttling down the relative bandwidth per core.

    [Please don't waste time trying to convince me I don't need ECC.
    SGIs taught me otherwise and soft error rates really are on the rise. Just answer the question thanks.]
  • Two questions?

    1. How relevant is it to have memory that is this fast? As I understand it, no matter how fast memory is, if there isn't enough of it, your computer has to read and write from swap space on the hard drive, and even the fastest harddrive is at least a million times slower than slow memory, since it is a matter of nanoseconds vs. milliseconds (someone might correct me on the technicalities of this). So wouldn't lots of normal speed, or even slow memory, work better than too little ultra-fast memory? (Someone should just build a system that can support 8 gigs of 30 pin SiMMs!)

    2. Am I a cranky old man who isn't up on this trend of memory needing active cooling? The closest I've seen is RAMBUS with aluminum sinks built in. It seems that no matter how efficient the cooling system claims to be, active cooling is another thing that can go wrong. I would much rather have slower memory that I don't have to worry about frying, then fast memory that is dependent on a fan that may break.

    So, with those things in mind, how worthwhile is this?

    • How relevant is it to have memory that is this fast?

      Very. Memory IO is very important to performance. Intel, since the P4 has been trying to push the FSB frequency higher and higher, and using dual-channels to double the speed. AMD chose instead to integrate the memory controller onto the CPU, which reduced latency, and gave them a big performance boost. Even there, the only difference between socket 478 and 939 is the later has dual-channel memory.

      if there isn't enough of it, your computer has to read

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by zippthorne (748122)
        No, he's saying that more memory is better than fast memory. He might not need 8GB, but it's likely that 8GB of RAM would improve system performance better than doubling the speed of the ram.

        The whole assumption is that anyone needing that much performance will be butting up against disk read bottlenecks due to swap anyway.

        My question to programmers is this, Swap may have made sense 30 years ago, when ram was like $8/byte and not much faster than disk anyway, but in 2007, ram is ubiquitous and MUCH faster
        • If you are using swap then, yes, you have way too little memory. I have a desktop with 1.5GB of RAM, and it never swaps unless I leave an ISO in tmpfs for a few days. On the other hand, under Windows XP it would swap regularly. There is no reason for a normal computer user to be using swap regularly, and if you doing something fancy (ex. DB server) you are probably going to get a lot of memory so you will still not be using swap.
        • My question to programmers is this, Swap may have made sense 30 years ago, when ram was like $8/byte and not much faster than disk anyway, but in 2007, ram is ubiquitous and MUCH faster than disk. Why do we even have swap anymore at all?

          Because RAM isn't quite ubiquitous, and because people still run out of memory even when they max out their systems -- or, for that matter, when they buy as much RAM for their systems as they can afford. Remember, RAM is only relatively inexpensive, when compared to the pric

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by DaleGlass (1068434)
            That's just the Linux kernel having a stupid behavior by default.

            By default, it lets processes overcommit memory. That means you can malloc more than there actually is. This is done with the expectation that programs allocate extra memory they don't actually use. Problem is that an excessive allocation succeeds, but then the system can't satisfy it, so it has to kill some random process.

            Do this:

            # echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

            This will turn off overcommit completely. When some program tries t

        • "Why do we even have swap anymore at all?"

          Swap allows for more effecient use of memory, which isn't as ubiquitous as you seem to think (we're constantly finding the 16G limit on sensibly priced/available hardware somewhat annoying) -- if you're pushing the limits of physical memory, swap allows for least used pages to be written out to disk to leave expensive and scarce physical memory available for things that actually need it. Go ahead - allocate and dirty a whole bunch of memory for a bit and force your
      • The active cooling on memory is just like those cheap aftermarket rear fins you see on cheap riced out wannabe cars. All show, adds nothing to go.

  • pointless (Score:5, Informative)

    by starman97 (29863) on Saturday March 24 2007, @12:21PM (#18471541)
    The basic structure of Dynamic RAM has not changed, it still takes about 50nS for row precharge (Tras
    and 20bS column reads. All they've done is speed up the interface logic. The memory cell access is no faster.
    OK, so once you've opened a row, you can read that faster, but how many operating systems are
    optimized to keep the data row aligned in the system memory? You have a data request that is outside
    of the row you've opened, you have to close that row and open another, 120nS penalty.
    At 1.0GHz, that's 120 clock cycles.
    • and yeah, BFCs (big, fast caches) are far more important than fast main memory for the majority of applications. Nevertheless, these fast memories sell really well on the enthusiast market, where most people don't really know what a cache really is.

      • BFCs (big, fast caches) are far more important than fast main memory for the majority of applications.
        So why are multi-core chips taking over the home market? Why not just use all that chip real estate for more cache instead of a second core?

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anpheus (908711)
          Because there are two ways to beat the latency problem. One is to get the information closer to the chip (cache) and the other is to allow the chip to do something else, or several something elses at the same time (multiple cores, multiple execution units of various kinds, etc.) If you haven't noticed, the latest Intel chips sport ridiculously large caches (they're up to 12-16MiB now) and have 4 cores.

          So... they're still using a lot of real estate for cache.
          • I associate oversized caches with Intel's "Extreme" line of processors, which (for some reason) offered virtually no performance boost.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Jeff DeMaagd (2015)
            The Itaniums are up to 24MB, but the x86 quad cores are "only" up to 8MB total. The next generation Core processors will probably go up to 16.
      • Well ok, the memory this fast is right now, but faster memory in general isn't. There's a reason why Intel and AMD use faster memory with newer generation processors. Though there may be rather large latencies reading from it, you still have to do so in the end. Big though your cache may be, it isn't going to hold everything. I mean a big L2 cache these days is 4MB. Often a single executable is bigger than that, never mind the associated data it wants. So you need main memory.

        Well, one thing when you have f
    • Interleaving can help out there.
      • Faster RAM will help you clock your processor to higher speeds. Period.

        Well, that is mostly because of locked frequency multipliers. The only way to increase CPU speed is to speed up the bus, and that means speeding up your RAM/etc. It is really an artificial limitation - if you could adjust the multiplier you could just overclock the CPU - and just let it wait longer for memory fetches if necessary.

        Sure, faster RAM is better than slower RAM - the question is whether this is the best place to spend your m

  • This is a fan and a heatsink (Score:5, Funny)

    by Animats (122034) on Saturday March 24 2007, @12:39PM (#18471683) Homepage

    This isn't a new DRAM chip. This is an ad from the fan and heatsink crowd.

  • another active cooler. w00t. (Score:3, Funny)

    by yeremein (678037) on Saturday March 24 2007, @01:28PM (#18472107)
    Yet another whiny fan to sieze up and die in six months.

    How long before they put active heatsinks on mice?

  • I just bought 4 2gig Gskill sticks and the BIOS isn't stable unless the 4th slot is empty. From what I've heard[*], this is a pretty common problem with filling up all for slots. Nice speed, but tell marketing they need to deliver stability also.

    [*] - http://groups.google.com/group/misc.forsale.comput ers.memory/browse_thread/thread/9dcf22f919ada367/2 30b6421faf43861 [google.com]
  • High Performance DDR2

    There's a High Performance Dance Dance Revolution 2?
  • The memory companies seem to be fighting the Ghz wars of yesteryear. They release these "performance" products that boast tighter timings and higher clocks, that don't translate into significant real-world performance gains because the bottlenecks usually lie elsewhere, like the northbridge or on-CPU memory controller. Corsair strikes me as a big marketing machine with just a few uber-hyped products. Truth is, in my experiences I've seen more Corsair memory cause problems than the generic stuff, mostly b

    • In other news, (Score:5, Funny)

      by Looce (1062620) on Saturday March 24 2007, @11:47AM (#18471289) Journal
      "Performance $OBJECT manufacturer, $COMPANY recently released a new addition to their flagship $BRAND line of $OBJECT(s), the $MODELNUMBER. This $OBJECTDESCRIPTION features the company's $SUPERLONGFEATURENAME, support for $ANOTHERFEATURENAME ($ABBR), it includes one of $COMPANY's $OTHERPRODUCTHERE, and it's rated for operation at a currently industry leading $OWNAGESPEC."

      Seriously, this sounds a lot like any other marketing gimmick ever invented. And it is just asking for a car analogy. Simply replace $COMPANY with Chevrolet, and start imagining the rest..!
      • "Performance $CAR->OBJECT manufacturer, $CAR->COMPANY recently released a new addition to their flagship $CAR->BRAND line of $CAR->OBJECT(s), the $CAR->MODELNUMBER. This $CAR->OBJECTDESCRIPTION features the company's $CAR->SUPERLONGFEATURENAME, support for $CAR->ANOTHERFEATURENAME ($CAR->ABBR), it includes one of $CAR->COMPANY's $CAR->OTHERPRODUCTHERE, and it's rated for operation at a currently industry leading $CAR->OWNAGESPEC." ;)

    • I just wanted to build up the most awesome gaming computer possible that will never see anything more complicated than solitaire.
      Now try to run Vista's solitaire. I bet your FPS will be soooooo low.

      • Re:I've got it (Score:5, Funny)

        by Terminal Saint (668751) on Saturday March 24 2007, @11:49AM (#18471299)
        Yeah, like giving it to me so I can spend it on hardware that will be outdated in 6 months.
      • I bought it to do high-end video processing, virtualization, and I got a good deal on all of it (except for the processor and memory) which I bought from NewEgg. The 850watt Cooler Master Power Supply pulled so much juice that the computer wouldn't even post until I used the big thick power cable that came with the power supply.

        Every few years I build up an awesome machine, just for fun.
      • Every piece of hardware will be outdated in 6months. So you can either never buy computer hardware because of worrying about it being outdated or just buy the hardware that you actually need.
        • My dad's method is to stick to win95 until forced to 98, XP until Vista, ect. Right now he is using 98.

    • Re:GFs Pussy (Score:5, Funny)

      by sokoban (142301) on Saturday March 24 2007, @11:50AM (#18471307) Homepage
      If the smell is really strong it is probably some sort of infection which is causing there to be high levels of trimethylamine oxide which cause a fishy odor. Get her on a regimen of Flagyl to treat the infection.
    • It's probably dirty. To clean it, deflate her and wash with warm soapy water, then hang up to air dry.

    • Your DRAM in a PC is essentially an L3 cache. Your disk, an L4. With todays CPU's hitting 90%+ L1 cache hits, and 85% L2 cache hits what they've done is double the speed of 15% of your cache misses. BFD. Net overall system performance increase is maybe 5% depending upon your application.

      A little math helps a lot.

      Let's assume 1 cycle L1 and a 2 cycle access to a 64-byte/line L2 cache. So an L1 cache miss costs 8 cycles. So if you had 90% hit rate on L1, and 100% hit on L2, your processor will spend 8*

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