RAM is the most expensive and fastest memory you can attach to your computer or workstation. Even SSDs do not come close to the read-write speeds a ram module can achieve. The only problem with RAM is that the price per GB ratio is very high hence it being so expensive.
Samsung has recently announced a new RAM module showing the potential of what DDR5 can achieve. The single module has a space of a whopping 512GB. That’s a lot of chrome tabs right there. The module is the first to use the new High-K Metal Gate or HKMG technology. It is reported to deliver up to 7,200 Mbps speed, which is double what is possible with DDR4.
According to Samsung, this module, for the time being, is only aimed at the supercomputer market. That’s understandable as supercomputing, with all those AI and machine learning stuff, is super data-hungry.
Samsung’s goal is to eventually launch DDR5 for regular PCs to boost gaming and RAM-hungry applications. The HKMG technology was first used in the GDDR6 for GPUs. The technology, which was developed by Intel, uses hafnium instead of silicon, with metals replacing the normal polysilicon gate electrodes. All of that allows for higher chip densities while reducing current leakage. Each chip in the module has eight layers of 16Gb DRAM chips which equals a capacity of 16GB (b is bits and B is bytes).
Every ram module has 32 of these chips for a whopping total of 512GB of RAM. The chip is reported to use 13% less power than non-HKMG modules. The module would be able to deliver about 57.6 GB/s transfer speeds on a single channel. Intel, in Samsung’s press release, said that the memory would be compatible with their new next-gen “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon processors. The new architecture would use an eight-channel DDR5 controller, so there is a possibility for multi-terabyte memory configurations with memory transfer speeds as high as 460 GB/s.
AMD’s upcoming Zen 4 platform is rumored to support DDR5 so we may see the RAM come to consumer PCs in 2022. By the way how many chrome tabs could someone open with 512GB of RAM?
