SENIOR MEMORY analyst Nam Hyung Kim at iSuppli said in a weekly report that in his view it"s unlikely Intel will succeed in shifting the market to DDR-2 during 2004. According to Kim, the major Dramurai have a good set of plans in place, and he describes Intel"s own attempts to promote DDR-2 as an admirable job.
But there are some elements of the DDR-2 memory platform that still have to be put in place. He said that Intel"s validation site doesn"t yet show any system level DIMM module validation yet, while its own DDR-2 chipsets don"t come out until the second quarter. And usually it"s a year or so after a release of this type of nature before there"s widespread take up. Changes have to be made at the motherboard design level and that means those manufacturers have to move to support DDR-2, with a subsequent cost to them. Kim said that they may be hesitant to jump after previous problems.