I'm surprised RAMBUS is still in business considering all the lawyers fees. I could make toast and they'd claim I infringed on one of their patents.
Its because they won a fair number of their plethora of suits, and many companies didn't want to even mess with them and simply signed & paid for licensing agreements. It's unfortunate, but the US patent system is just going to make this more of the status quo.
With the increased memory performance of the P67 chipset I wonder if there will really be any noticeable, real world difference between the fastest DDR3 and DDR4? Clearly there was between DDR2 and DDR3 but won't there be diminishing returns at some point?
Technically the memory performance has nothing to do with the chipset anymore! But performance differences shouldn't be huge... given processors are only getting fatter pipes at the front-end for receiving ever larger data dumps, we very well may see another small performance jump like we saw with DDR2-800 to DDR3-1333.
Given there are over 22 SKUs on Newegg for DDR3 RAM rated from 2133MHz to 2500MHz, the speeds don't interest me as much as that sizable voltage drop. That should drop power consumption in laptops by low double-digit percentages, and reduce the heat generation in them too.