[Sweclockers] Skylake gets both DDR3 and DDR4 support + more

[Mondozei]

In addition, the top model will be called Z170 and not Z107.

Their Taiwanese sources also say that the other stuff that has been leaked, like a release date in Q2 2015 is the same as before. Most of the new Skylake processors will be lower-end, and locked. Something we also knew from before.

Here is what IHS predicted for DD4 prices:

With Skylake supporting both DDR3 and DDR4, the expected price falls may be much slower. Also, it would complicate things for motherboard vendors, who now have to do multiple models of each motherboard model, one supporting DDR3 and one supporting DDR4.

Source

 

[mikk]

It confirms CPU-world. K-models will be Broadwell exclusive whilst Skylake aims for the non-K Mainstream market. DDR3+DDR4 support is a good news for me, I'm using 2x4 GB DDR3-2133 and could reuse it for Skylake.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Hoping for some boards supporting both ddr3 and ddr4 , i remember some older 775 boards going as far as adding in ddr support and agp which is awesome.

 

[Revolution 11]

It confirms CPU-world. K-models will be Broadwell exclusive whilst Skylake aims for the non-K Mainstream market. DDR3+DDR4 support is a good news for me, I'm using 2x4 GB DDR3-2133 and could reuse it for Skylake.

Skylake will not have K processers? Well, another "tock" to skip. :'(

 

[TreVader]

Why would anybody buy DDR3 over DDR4 as a platform for Skylake over even a 30% price premium?


8GB of DDR3 is $60 if that turns into 80 am I going to handicap my system and remove the capacity to upgrade just to use legacy RAM?


So dumb. Does DDR4 use the same slots/pinouts? I thought they were different.

 

[Homeles]

Why would anybody buy DDR3 over DDR4 as a platform for Skylake over even a 30% price premium?


8GB of DDR3 is $60 if that turns into 80 am I going to handicap my system and remove the capacity to upgrade just to use legacy RAM?


So dumb. Does DDR4 use the same slots/pinouts? I thought they were different.

They have different slots and have different pin counts.

Memory bandwidth is virtually useless for most applications... very little reason to get DDR4 if it costs more.

 

[TreVader]

They have different slots and have different pin counts.

Memory bandwidth is virtually useless for most applications... very little reason to get DDR4 if it costs more.

Except to not lock yourself into using legacy ram that might be hard to find and more expensive later?

 

[Homeles]

Get a combo DDR3 + DDR4 board.

Anyway, right now it's very easy to get a hold of DDR2, and inexpensive too.

 

[mikk]

Why would anybody buy DDR3 over DDR4 as a platform for Skylake over even a 30% price premium?

Because DDR4 isn't faster than cheap DDR3-2133 or DDR3-2400 initially? The question is not valid for lots of users. Many users could reuse their current DDR3 for SKL from SB, IVB, HSW.

 

[Homeles]

Because DDR4 isn't faster than cheap DDR3-2133 or DDR3-2400 initially? The question is not valid for lots of users. Many users could reuse their current DDR3 for SKL from SB, IVB, HSW.

And Nehalem

Heck, even some Core 2 boards had support for it.

 

[mikk]

Or any AMD DDR3 platform. Of course the older DDR3 platforms might run on slower DDR3-1066 or DDR3-1333 and maybe 2x2GB only. In this case an upgrade to 2x4+ GB is overdue for a gaming platform. In my case I see no reason why I should upgrade from 2x4GB DDR3-2133 to DDR4. For me DDR3 support are good news.

 

[Pheesh]

I would not be surprised if the LPDDR3/DDR3L is only a niche option on the lower end mobile sku's, so that's where the 'supports DDR3/DDR4' is coming from. I doubt mainstream will support DDR3, it will be DDR4 only.

 

[jihe]

Why would anybody buy DDR3 over DDR4 as a platform for Skylake over even a 30% price premium?


8GB of DDR3 is $60 if that turns into 80 am I going to handicap my system and remove the capacity to upgrade just to use legacy RAM?


So dumb. Does DDR4 use the same slots/pinouts? I thought they were different.

Except you are not...

 

[SPBHM]

Except you are not...

it is a limitation for the IGP.

 

[DigDog]

Get a combo DDR3 + DDR4 board.

the ones they did for the DDR2 / DDR3 switch were horrible.

also, who needs ram anymore. 8Gb DDR3 is all 99% of us needs to play games.
the other 1% can do whatever they want. because they are the 1%.

i'm old enough to remember killing services on XP to get the last Mb of 2x512Mb ram out of my sticks. its not 2005 anymore.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

the ones they did for the DDR2 / DDR3 switch were horrible.

also, who needs ram anymore. 8Gb DDR3 is all 99% of us needs to play games.
the other 1% can do whatever they want. because they are the 1%.

Then I feel good being a 1%'er...

Which boards where that? Had a couple ASUS boards with DDR2/3 support (G45-based I think). They where quite good all things considered.

i'm old enough to remember killing services on XP to get the last Mb of 2x512Mb ram out of my sticks. its not 2005 anymore.

I'm old enough to have run Win2K on 32MB RAM... :biggrin:

 

[24601]

Getting stuck with only 2 DIMM slots with Single Rank DIMMs topping out at 8GB is going to be a devolution as well.

Double, Triple, and Quad Rank DIMMs will most likely have an outrageous premium as they always have.

It will be even more hilarious for Haswell-E being limited to 4 slots making 32 gB the highest affordable amount of DDR4 you can get. A massive devolution from the 64 gB of cheaper DDR3 for Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E.

 

[RussianSensation]

the ones they did for the DDR2 / DDR3 switch were horrible.

also, who needs ram anymore. 8Gb DDR3 is all 99% of us needs to play games.
the other 1% can do whatever they want. because they are the 1%.

i'm old enough to remember killing services on XP to get the last Mb of 2x512Mb ram out of my sticks. its not 2005 anymore.

You can use RamDISK on your motherboard with more than 8GB of RAM to create a virtual drive from your system memory. The performance increase is very impressive.

Crysis "Recovery" Level Load Times (average, in seconds):
HDD : 41.7s
SSD : 37.4s
RAM : 26.9s
Source

RamDisk is free with some MSI and Asus ROG boards.

 

[RussianSensation]

It will be even more hilarious for Haswell-E being limited to 4 slots making 32 gB the highest affordable amount of DDR4 you can get. A massive devolution from the 64 gB of cheaper DDR3 for Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E.

8 DIMMs with 64GB of RAM support.

Source

 

[Homeles]

8 DIMMs with 64GB of RAM support.

He might have been commenting on boards that support DDR3 and DDR4, which would halve the slots available. However, the comment I made about combo boards was for Skylake, not Haswell-E. Either way, he doesn't have a point.

 

[24601]

8 DIMMs with 64GB of RAM support.

Source

Guess every single news story before today are lies then.

Typical.

Never trust the news.

We were told from the first inkling of DDR4 to before this article came out that DDR4 was strictly point to point and will only get us 1 slot per channel.

That's obviously false.

 

[Homeles]

Guess every single news story before today are lies then.

Typical.

Never trust the news.

We were told from the first inkling of DDR4 to before this article came out that DDR4 was strictly point to point and will only get us 1 slot per channel.

That's obviously false.

You can have more than one dimm/channel with point-to-point. You use a switch. You need better sources.

Regardless, this whole PtP thing is ridiculous. I've spent maybe 4 or 5 hours scouring the internet, and it almost appears that it's the biggest game of telephone gone bad. Despite hundreds of claims littering the internet, I can't find anything mentioning channel configuration in the technical papers from Micron, Hynix, Samsung, JEDEC... ridiculous. Nothing straight from the horse's mouth, but plenty from everyone else, which of course is meaningless.

It appears that having multiple DIMMs per channel, without a switch, is fine. However, signal integrity worsens as you add DIMMs to a channel. It appears this can be managed with care, but as RAM speeds increase, it may become unmanageable.

For now, motherboard manufacturers may be able to get by with having 2 DIMMs/channel, but as speeds get higher, they likely find themselves dropping the multi-drop bus and moving to point-to-point. If this is all true, then the concept of channels and DIMMs must be completely abstracted from the memory controller, I'd assume, or that the (Intel) DDR4 controllers themselves actually support multiple DIMMs/channel.

 

[BFG10K]

You can use RamDISK on your motherboard with more than 8GB of RAM to create a virtual drive from your system memory. The performance increase is very impressive.

Crysis "Recovery" Level Load Times (average, in seconds):
HDD : 41.7s
SSD : 37.4s
RAM : 26.9s
Source

RamDisk is free with some MSI and Asus ROG boards.

This is invalid since it wasn't timed how long it took to copy the data to the RAM disk in the first place. Add that time and you'll get the SSD/HDD time, if not longer.

But even more importantly, once you've done that, you've essentially replicated what the OS does anyway with a disk cache, but it does it automatically and with far smarter algorithms than you can ever do it manually.

RAM disks can have some really obscure niche benefits if you know exactly why you're using them, but for the most part they're completely useless.