Samsung announced a new 512 GB DDR5 module, capable of transfer rates of up to 7200 Mbps and built with high-k metal gate technology. Some of you may remember discussions about HKMG a few years ago, when Intel introduced technology for CPUs, or again during the 28nm / 32nm era, when it was discussed as part of the gate-first / gate-last debate.
Switching to a high k dielectric means that Samsung has adopted a new material substitute for the silicon dioxide port dielectric that it previously used. This new material – Intel used hafnium in 2007 – has a higher dielectric constant (k) value than the silicon dioxide that Samsung probably used previously, which means it leaks less current at the same thickness.
We saw this technology implanted in logic chips first, but as the geometry of the process has shrunk, it has also become useful for the DRAM industry.
According to Samsung, these new HKMG modules use 13% less energy than they would otherwise use. Samsung debuted HKMG in GDDR6 in 2018, but this is the first time we’ve seen the technology in conventional desktop memory.
DDR5 support is expected to be introduced with Intel’s Sapphire Rapids platform, due in 2022. We can see some prototype systems with Intel’s DDR5 and Alder Lake – the company can design its next generation chip to support DDR4 and DDR5 . Any update to the AMD platform this year is also likely to use DDR4. DDR5 updates for consumer hardware and new platforms (LGA1700 for Intel and an expected AM5 for AMD) are likely to arrive in 2022 as well.
DDR5, when it arrives, is expected to start at DDR5-4800 – 1.5x the bandwidth of the latest generation DDR4 – and then increase from there, with speeds as high as DDR5-8400 theoretically possible, as soon as possible. memory manufacturers get some time with the standard. This is a departure from the previous DDR transitions, where the new standard was launched on the bandwidth of the old standard. You could buy DDR3-2400, but the highest clock approved by JEDEC was DDR3-1600, and that’s when DDR4 started. Desktop CPUs are not strongly tied to latency, so it will be interesting to see if the larger bandwidth gap between DDR4 and DDR5 at launch produces a significant performance gap outside memory-sensitive benchmarks.
Integrated graphics, on the other hand, will always benefit from more memory bandwidth. The dual channel DDR5-8400 would provide the equivalent of 134.4 GB / s of memory bandwidth for an integrated solution and we hope to have it.
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