DDR vs. SDRAM Power – Revisited

DDR Still Shows it’s Power Advantage

Last week, I posted some numbers provided by Micron regarding the power savings of their PC1600 DDR modules vs. their PC133 SDRAM modules. These numbers were fairly impressive, however some readers questioned the validity of them because they felt it was not a ‘fair’ comparison. A few speculated that PC2100 modules would likely not fare so well against PC133, and suggested that this was why Micron did not make this direct comparison.

In answer to these allegations, I can only provide the following chart. Again, these results have been provided by Micron Technology, and while the power savings are not quite as large as the last comparison, they are still quite impressive, at an average of about 40%. Based upon these numbers it is not surprising that manufacturers have focused most of their efforts to implementing DDR in servers for the near future.

Figure 1 – Power Dissipation of DDR vs SDRAM. Courtesy Micron Technology, Inc.