The Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (Jedec) has published the specifications of the forthcoming Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) memory standard. 

DDR3 memory promises improvements in performance and power consumption over DDR2 and older standards.

The new technology operates at 1.5V and offers an increased operating temperature range. DD2 operates at 2.5V and DD1 used 1.8V. DDR3 also doubles the pre-fetch buffer from 4-bit to 8-bit.

The new memory modules will especially shine in applications that require the transfer of large amounts of memory. The decreases in power consumption will also help increase battery life in laptops.

In a joint statement with the Jedec, Intel touted the technology as an improvement for low-power mobile devices as well as high-end systems used for gaming, video encoding or 3D visualisation.

Jedec expects that DDR3 memory will feature modules ranging from 512Mb to 8Gb. The chips will operate at transfer rates ranging from 800 to 1,600 million transfers per second.