AMD has apparently had a few words to say about DDR2. There’s a few words here, there’s a few more specific words there.
When? It boils down to “when DDR2-667 shows up, and DDR2 is fairly cheap.”
This points to somewhere between mid- to late 2005.
I suppose that’s better than no comment at all, though this seems to just confirm some earlier speculation on the subject.
Timing The Big Move
What AMD said doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless DDR/DDR2 support is an either/or proposition. If supporting DDR2 is just a matter of adjusting the memory controller a bit, the best time to change the silicon would be when they went to 90nm.
If, on the other hand, going to DDR2 is a big deal (as the earlier article linked above mentioned, perhaps requiring a new socket), this is going to put a whole lot of you in a quandary.
Many, if not most, who currently have AMD platforms and want to keep it that way are figuring they’ll move from socket A to Hammer once 90nm Hammers get cheap. This will probably happen about a year from now.
What happens then? Do people buy then, only to find that they’ll need to change the CPU AND mobo AND memory to get up to speed three or six or maybe nine months later? Or do they really wait to get it all?
Alternatively, people could buy a socket 939 system a couple months from now, upgrade to a 90nm CPU later, and then they’ll see what happens.
That would probably work for a lot of people, though it is far from certain AMD will accommodate those people with a reasonably affordable s939 chip sooner rather than later. For that matter, AMD doesn’t seem to be too terribly interested in making a lot of Hammers period.
And that is a far greater mystery than when DDR2 support might pop up.
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