Despite the economic recession as well as slowing demand towards personal computers, the demands of high-performance PC enthusiasts and gamers are continue growing. According to Andy Paul, chief executive officer and president of Corsair Memory, a leading maker of advanced memory products, by the end of the year the majority of dual-channel kits will be 8GB, a rather high capacity for today

“By the end of the year, I think many or most dual channel builds will transition to 8GB,” said Mr. Paul. “Memory cost will continue to trend downwards, Windows 7 will be out there and applications programmers will produce applications and games that are designed to take advantage of 64-bit memory addressing. Even now many of our customers are populating machines with 12GB.”

At present, even Corsair Memory itself does not offer 8GB dual-channel memory kits. Just like other suppliers of advanced memory modules, Corsair concentrates on 6GB triple-channel memory module kits aimed at Intel Core i7-based systems. However, now that Advanced Micro Devices has released its AMD Phenom II processors with DDR3 memory support and Intel Corp. is gearing up to launch other Nehalem micro-architecture based chips with dual-channel memory controller, advanced dual-channel DDR3 module kits seem to have a lot of prospects.

The transition to DDR3 memory is proceeding quite slowly: the new memory type has been on the market for two years now and it has not reached the crossover with DDR2 yet. However, the head of Corsair believes that the transition is going fine and that the latest central processing units (CPUs) will finally help to drive the DDR3 to the mainstream market.

“[Transition to DDR3] is 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. 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 […]. Recently the Core i7 CPU has mainly been driving the volume of DDR3 in the enthusiast market, but we expect the socket AM3 AMD Phenom II CPU with DDR3 to help the transition,” explained Andy Paul.

The chief executive officer of Corsair did not reveal when his company plans to unveil the first 8GB dual-channel DDR3 memory kits. Theoretically, Corsair may launch a kit consisting of four 2GB memory modules, however, historically such kits have never become popular.

From the components’ availability point of view, all Corsair Memory needs to create a pair of cost-effective 4GB memory modules are affordable 2Gb memory chips or 4Gb memory chips. Earlier this year Samsung Electronics unveiled its 4Gb DDR3 chips made using 50nm fabrication process and Kingston Memory, a rival of Corsair, demonstrated single-sided 4GB modules this February.

Tags: Corsair, DDR3, DDR2, 4Gb, Samsung