Today, the company announced that 21 of its DDR3 memory components and modules have now been "officially validated" to work with Intel's reference platform chipsets.

At this point, the news may seem like nothing more than a PR ploy, but given the fact that Gigabyte is announcing that Intel will launch its Series 3 chipsets in the coming weeks at Computex (at which time Gigabyte will also release its first three DDR3-compatible motherboards), it's actually quite a timely bit of news. The series 3, also known as Intel's next-generation Bearlake desktop chipset, will be the first to support DDR3, according to the company.

DDR3 SDRAM, or double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory (how's that for a mouthful?), is the name of the new DDR memory standard that is expected to succeed today's DDR2 SDRAM standard.

The memory is said to deliver a power consumption reduction of up to 40 percent when compared to current commercial DDR2 modules, and use only 1.5 volts of power--instead of the 1.8V for DDR2.

Comparing the DDR3-800, DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 modules with the DDR2 800, the average power usage drops respectively by 25, 29, and 40 percent, according to DRAMeXchange. Furthermore, these modules can also transfer data at an effective clock rate of between 800 to 1,600 MHz, compared to DDR2's current range of between 400 and 1,066 MHz.

But before you get too excited, the stuff's going to be expensive. Really expensive. Right now, DRAMeXchange reports that a DDR3 512-Mbyte chip is still above the $20 level, and that DDR3 512-Mbyte module prices currently hover around $180. That's eight times higher than the DDR2 512MB modules, if you're keeping track.

All that doesn't seem to be phasing Samsung, though. To meet market demand in desktop PCs, the company says it plans to begin full-scale mass production of its DDR3 chips later this quarter.