De mannen van iXBT Labs hebben hun maandelijkse samenvatting van hardware nieuws gepubliceerd. Ze bespreken de ontwikkelingen op processor, geheugen, moederborden, videokaarten en storage gebied van de laatste maand. Een erg handig stukje als je bijvoorbeeld de laatste maand op vakantie was. Hieronder een stukje over de ontwikkelingen op geheugen gebied:
In fact, there was nothing super important in July. Memory manufacturers transferred their production to 0.18-0.175micron technologies. This process is nearly over in Taiwan and according to Powerchip, the shift from 0.25micron to 0.18micron will reduce the DRAM chips cost by nearly 40%. Bearing in mind that the memory prices keep growing, it means a really nice revenue for the memory manufacturers.
And the prices do keep growing, which is pretty noticeable now. The average cost for a 128MB PC133 SDRAM module rose by nearly 10% within July, as to ICIS-LOR. Micron, for instance, announced prices increase on 64Mbit SDRAM chips, so that their contract cost surpassed $8 barrier per chip (remember that last month they cost $6). Therefore the memory manufacturers are pretty much sure that the prices will continue rising.
As for the technology, nothing special happened here. Kingmax announced its 150MHz SDRAM, which is a rather specific product, because it may be used only by overclocking fans.
One more exotic product was shown at Platform2000 by Enhanced memory Systems: PC133 High-Speed SDRAM (HSDRAM). The company claimed that a low-cost workstation with this memory proved 28-49% faster in OfficeBench than a similar system equipped with PC100 SDRAM or PC800 RDRAM. So, taking into account the situation on Intel's web-site described above, it was the second case already when SDRAM was proven to be much faster than its competitors not only in real situations but also in tests.