Samsung has announced yesterday that it will start shipping 60nm DDR2 chips later this year.

Samsung claims that the new technology will offer a 20% speed increase compared to 80nm DDR2 memory and significantly higher capacities. The new chips will be aimed at the high end memory market.

Chip capacity was doubled, from 1Gb to 2Gb, and Samsung claims that this greatly will improve power efficiency. For example, an 8GB module currently uses 72 1Gb chips, but with the new chips, an 8 GB module would use just 36, and consume around 30 percent less power.

This sounds like a good move, since DDR3 memory is still painfully expensive and DDR2 will probably stick around for quite a while.