Samsung, No Matter Which Direction The Industry Is Headed

Samsung has one message that it wants consumers to know: no matter which memory technology the industry chooses to adopt, they stand ready to provide it. Samsung has been quietly sneaking up on the other companies in the memory sector. Samsung had a market share of 29.3% in 2001 and expects its market share to increase to over 33% in 2002.

The company continues to offer a wide variety of options in memory for a variety of products. They still see a divergence of memory applications in all facets of the business. Memory is no longer exclusively for computer products, but now for other devices as well, and this has led to Samsung's continued growth and expansion. They have invested much in detail and process, which has resulted in their being able to consistently provide a wide variety of options at competitive costs.

Samsung outlined the current and future memory technologies and things quickly become more clear.

Samsung told us that they expect to ship 1 million pieces of PC 1066 RDRAM next month, which came as quite a surprise to us. They indicated that Intel will validate PC 1066 RDRAM for use with the Intel 850E platform. This, coupled with SiS's RDRAM P4 solution, shows that those who have been wanting to drive the final nail into the RDRAM coffin might be acting a bit too quickly. Samsung believes that it would be possible to deliver quad channel RDRAM quickly, and it could prove to be a higher bandwidth and better scaling solution than the current proposals on the table for DDR II which, it has been suggested, will top out at only 533.

Samsung projects that DDR II will only be able to deliver somewhere between 3.2 and 4.8 GB/s of peak memory bandwidth. On the RDRAM front, it's a different story. PC 1066 RDRAM offers over 4.2 GB/s and PC 1200 RDRAM is expected to deliver over 4.8 GB/s. PC 1333 RDRAM is expected to provide somewhere in the 5.x GB/s range. Not until DDR III 667 will it be able to closely match the performance of PC 1333 RDRAM.

Expect to see PC 1066 in Q3 2002 and PC 1200 in Q3 2003. On the other hand, don't expect to see DDR II till 1Q'04. So if you are waiting for DDR III, you are in for a little bit of a wait. One other point of interest - Samsung suggested that the new SiS RDRAM chipset, the R658, could easily handle PC 1200 Rambus with very little work and perhaps as little as a BIOS flash, maybe?