Earlier this week, I covered the battle between AMD and Intel over server power efficiency, and I blamed Intel's poor showing in this battle primarily on the FB-DIMM technology that the company uses with its Xeon processors. DDR2's power consumption appears to scale with the workload much better than that of FB-DIMM, mainly because FB-DIMM places a power-hungry memory buffer on each module.
This memory buffer may have the downside of boosting platform-level power consumption, but it does give FB-DIMM a host of advantages that vanilla DDR cannot match. If AMD has its way, though, FB-DIMM will have another year at most to enjoy those advantages before the company and its memory partners bring to market an FB-DIMM killer that will make DDR3 more of a fit for the server closet.
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