Samsung unveiled a new RAM module that shows the potential of DDR5 memory in terms of speed and capacity. The 512 GB DDR5 module is the first to use High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) technology, offering speeds of 7,200 Mbps – more than double that of DDR4, Samsung said. At the moment, it is geared towards supercomputing, AI and machine learning functions that consume a lot of data, but the DDR5 will eventually find its way to normal PCs, boosting games and other applications.
Samsung used HKMG technology for the first time in 2018 with GDDR6 chips used in GPUs. Developed by Intel, it uses hafnium instead of silicon, with metals replacing normal polysilicon door electrodes. All of this allows for higher chip densities, while reducing current leakage.
Each chip uses eight layers of 16 Gb DRAM chips for a capacity of 128 Gb or 16 GB. As such, Samsung would need 32 to make a 512 GB RAM module. In addition to the higher speeds and capacity, Samsung said the chip uses 13 percent less energy than non-HKMG modules – ideal for data centers, but not too bad for ordinary PCs.
At speeds of 7,200 Mbps, Samsung’s latest module would provide transfer speeds of around 57.6 GB / s on a single channel. In Samsung’s press release, Intel noted that the memory would be compatible with its next generation of scalable “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon processors. This architecture will use an eight-channel DDR5 memory controller, so we can see multi-terabyte memory configurations with memory transfer speeds of up to 460 GB / s. Meanwhile, the first consumer PCs may arrive in 2022, when AMD unveils its Zen 4 platform, which is supposed to support DDR5.