Samsung Will Produce 40nm 4Gb DDR3 Modules

Semiconductor giant Samsung has announced that it will be mass producing 4Gb DDR3 memory modules using advanced 40nm manufacturing process.

The memory, hailed by Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president of memory marketing at Samsung, as an "ultra-low green memory" product will be used initially in servers that will need to be Energy Star compliant.

With the new product, 32GB memory modules can be produced which is double what the top end memory module at Samsung was last year. 

On a server with two sockets and 12 memory modules, this means a maximum of 384GB memory in total. Furthermore, the 16GB memory based on the 4Gb modules is 35 percent more power efficient than the older generation.

In comparison, the old 1Gb DDR2 components, built using a 60-nm process, consumed a whopping 210 watts, six times more than a 4Gb modules.

Samsung says that it plans to move nearly all of its DRAM production to 40nm class technology as it gradually migrates to the cutting edge manufacturing process.

Expect these modules to appear in high end notebooks and workstations as they carry a significant premium overall due to the amount of memory they can cram per unit space.