Memory: Rising prices, RDRAM on the way, and a new toy

The High Density 256MB DIMM

Here's something the guys at Mushkin sent me, a 16 chip 256MB SDRAM DIMM using Toshiba SDRAM chips (16MB chips).  I'm messing with compatibility testing on this chip, but so far the outcome seems to be that this little (pun intended) puppy is much more compatible than the big monstrous 256MB modules we're used to. 

Take a look at the picture comparison below to see exactly what I'm talking about. 

Click to Enlarge

Here we have the "old" way of making 256MB modules, basically stacking two 128MB modules on top of each other.  This provided for quite a few incompatibilities with motherboards and did result in some system instability, since these modules were primarily used in servers, well, you can guess how great of an idea that was :)

Click to Enlarge

...and here is the consumer level 256MB module that Mushkin sent over, you'll start seeing more and more of these appear once DRAM prices drop to more reasonable levels. 

Click to Enlarge

Kingston also has had a module like that for quite some time, this is a registered DIMM and retails for considerably more however it provides the same basic functionality (18 chips on the Kingston due to an extra ECC bit on the Kingston chips).