Corsair CMK32GX4M4A2400C14B Fascicule

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DDR3 has been with us for a long time, and Corsair has been there pushing the bleeding 
edge of performance, cooperating with Intel, AMD, and motherboard manufacturers to 
produce the fastest memory consumers can buy. Yet DDR3 is getting long in the tooth 
and modern processor architectures are becoming increasingly demanding. When today’s 
hardware needs exotic, high-speed, carefully binned memory, it’s time to look to a new 
technology. 
 
Introduced in conjunction with Intel’s new high end desktop platform based on their 
Haswell-E architecture and the X99 chipset, DDR4 is designed to meet the needs of 
present and future platforms. It offers higher performance, lower power consumption, 
higher density, increased reliability, and a remarkably forward-thinking design geared for 
heretofore unprecedented scaling. In short, DDR4 is the memory technology we need, now 
and for tomorrow.

 
While Moore’s Law has slowed somewhat for x86 processors, the steady march of progress 
in terms of both performance and hardware integration has resulted in a hardware 
ecosystem that is very slowly reaching the limits of what can be achieved with DDR3. 
Increasingly powerful x86 cores are now being married with substantially powerful graphics 
hardware on a single die, boosting the stress placed on the memory bus and raising the 
amount of memory bandwidth needed to keep these new integrated processors fed. 
 
With Intel’s Haswell and AMD’s Kaveri architectures, we are seeing more and more 
situations where performance can be bottlenecked by a lack of memory bandwidth. 
Content creation (CAD, video editing, et al) continues to need as much memory capacity 
as possible. Meanwhile, mobile devices (notebooks, tablets) focus more and more on power 
efficiency. All of this, to say nothing of the ever escalating demands on enterprise and 
server hardware, hardware that often requires as much bandwidth and capacity as can be 
delivered while needing to reduce power consumption wherever possible. 
 
The demands of current and future hardware and software architectures can be met with 
DDR4.

 
To understand DDR4, we need to have at least a working knowledge of the history of 
DDR3. With rare exception, introductions of new memory standards operate cyclically. 
When the original double data rate (DDR) memory was introduced, users were still working 
with SDRAM running at 133MHz, and the benefits of moving to this faster standard were 
limited. The outgoing technology will always be more mature and have a better price-to-
performance ratio than its successor at time of launch; this was true of the transition from 
DDR to DDR2 and again from DDR2 to DDR3.