DDR3 power savings may be more important for Embedded Apps than for PCs

A new hands-on article written by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos just appeared on the Tom’s Hardware site (“How Much Power Does Low-Voltage DDR3 Memory Really Save?”). The article takes an in-depth, real-world look at 1.35/1.25V DDR3 SDRAM power consumption versus DDR2 SDRAM power consumption in a PC environment. Here’s the meat of the conclusion:

“There are more interesting differences in power consumption, though, which brings up back to the [Kingston HyperX DDR3 SDRAM] LoVo series. Idle power decreases only by 0.5 W when going from 1.5 V to 1.35 V and by another 0.5 W when switching to 1.25 V. This isn't much, but considering that the rest of the system remains unchanged, it's something. Peak power decreases from 178 W and 180 W at 1.5 V (DDR3-1333 and -1600 speeds) to 174 W and 177 W at 1.25 V and 1.35 V. While these numbers are certainly not very relevant to desktop PCs, the measured power consumption differences can become important once you start to power-optimize all other system components. At the end of the day, a few watts difference on a low-power desktop PC like our 25 W Core i5 system becomes quite relevant.”
What Schmid and Roos observed is that the use of low-voltage DDR3 SDRAM cut system power by about a Watt at idle and by as much as three to six Watts at peak operating loads. When the overall system dissipates well more than 100 Watts, as do most high-end multicore PCs, the relative power saving from low-voltage DDR3 SDRAM isn’t much. However, designers of mobile and wireless embedded systems that employ low-power processors try to squeeze every milliwatt out of the system design to prolong battery life and talk time, so a few Watts of power savings is a very big deal indeed.

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