Corsair CEO Andy Paul on DDR3 ,future and a little bit of history
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AMD’s senior manager of advanced marketing Ian McNaughton recently sat down with Corsair CEO Andy Paul for a little chat on his views on DDR3 transition and future of the company.
When asked about how the transition from DDR2 to DDR3 was going, Andy replied, “It’s going quite well; this has been an easy transition for the customer. DDR3 has entered the market with no real compatibility problems or performance glitches. And, the cost of DDR3 has continued to trend downwards as expected. 4GB or even 6GB of DDR3 is now easily within the component budget for a typical system build. And we are hitting speeds of 2000 MHZ.”
The launch of Intel’s Core i7 family of CPU’s has been a big driving factor for DDR3 going mainstream. With AMD launching its AM3 DDR3 based platform, DDR3 adoption rate should pick up further which will help drive the cost down further. As Andy pointed out that the cost of DDR3 is not an issue anymore. A quick search on Newegg, proves Andy right, with many DDR3 kits under a $100 and some similarly priced to DDR2.
A common consensus in the tech community is that lower latency is everything to go by, and DDR3 lacks to DDR2 in latency department. When asked about this Andy was quick to point out, “DDR3 has already passed DDR2 in terms of latency. Remember, latency is notated in clock cycles, but actually represents elapsed time. So, 1600MHz CAS-8 is actually LOWER latency (and thus, faster) than 800MHz CAS-5. Corsair’s fastest available part is 2000MHz CAS-7, which means that the latency is 3.5 nanoseconds. This is the same latency as 800MHz CAS-2.8 which of course does not exist!”
In three years time, Andy expects Corsair to be as well known for its cases and power supplies as it is for its high-performance memory.
Then Andy had some interesting facts about Corsair’s history for us that should interest you. Corsair was started as a L2 Cache modules supplier to large OEMs when CPU’s did not have onboard L2 cache. Around the same time, DRAM was transitioning from EDO to SDRAM, and Corsair decided to jump into the DRAM market. Now Corsair sells not only memory, but power supplies and flash drives as well.
I’m sure all of you recognize this, do you know how this came into being ? Well, Andy used to spend every weekend sailing and he thought that would be the best place to figure out the Corsair business strategy over a few beers. That is how the pirate name, Corsair, came into being.
Read the full interview here.
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