American humorist, novelist and satirist Samuel Clemens—known by his pen name Mark Twain—scribed this response in May 1897 to New York Journal correspondent Frank Marshall White, who contacted Mark Twain in London about his rumored health:
“I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about, I have even heard on good authority that I was dead. James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Such it is for Micron’s 8Gb DDR3 product offering. Despite some industry articles indicating last year that Micron was announcing end-of-life for our 8Gb DDR3 devices—marking all 8Gb DDR3 DDP two chip select (2CS) devices end-of-life without replacement, leaving customers with no supply—Micron remains committed to a DDR3 product offering for 1, 2, 4 and 8Gb devices. Micron recognizes that while DDR4 has led industry DRAM technology bit shipments since Q4 2018, with 8Gb DDR4 leading density shipments following servers launching with DDR4 in 2014, DDR3 endures in segments beyond PCs and servers.
Demand for higher density, higher temperature DDR3 is increasing, particularly with the proliferation of IoT applications requiring low-cost microcontrollers and potentially extreme temperatures. Micron has single- and dual-rank 8Gb products—2CS 8Gb devices in x4 and x8 configurations in production and shipping for commercial applications; 1CS 8Gb x16 devices are sampling for automotive applications supporting temperatures up to 105°C, such as those needed for infotainment, navigation and industrial applications including avionics.
Likewise, claims that 8Gb DDR3 product availability lead times are “prohibitively high” are hyperbole. Micron’s DRAM portfolio supports a broad array of DDR3 devices, and they are ready to ship. Orderable devices include dual-rank x4 (2G x4), x8 (1G x8) configuration in FBGA 78-ball packages and single-rank x16 (512Mb x16) in FBGA 96-ball packages.
Micron’s DDR3 portfolio assists hardware and system designers to optimize board layout and develop modular designs seamlessly across different package sizes, capacities, and temperatures. Beyond components, Micron uninterruptedly offers a DDR3 module portfolio in RDIMM, LRDIMM, EUDIMM, and ECC/SODIMM form factors from 2GB to 16GB based upon 2Gb and 4Gb DDR3 components.
As Micron innovates ground-breaking memory and storage technologies to enable high performance for leading-edge applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), it concurrently sustains industry-proven technologies that find new ways to serve as solutions in an advancing propagation of creative end uses. Customers can relax, throw off the bowlines, and set sail in confidence that Micron’s 8Gb DDR3 is not an endangered species, but rather is alive and well—and that’s no exaggeration.
