THE FUTURE OF DRAM

This could be the year we see the first DDR5 memory kits make it to market. We saw Micron and Cadence demo working DDR5 memory in late 2018, and even with JEDEC not finalizing the spec just yet, manufacturers are expecting to begin production in the latter half of 2019.

When it comes to DDR5, although it looks to be more of the same, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Expect MT/s (MHz for the marketing gurus out there) to start at speeds of 4,266MT/s and reach 6,400MT/s, followed by a drop in voltage from 1.2V down to 1.1V, and a doubling in maximum capacity per chip, as usual.

According to Cadence and Micron, however, all that is just icing on the cake. The big changes will be at an architectural design level. Thanks to an improved command bus efficiency, superior refresh structures, and more bank groups being available to the processor, end users can expect nearly a 30 percent performance increase in real-world bandwidth, and that’s just when comparing two identically clocked DDR4 and DDR5 kits together. Take a 3,200MT/s kit and compare it to a DDR5 4,800MT/s kit, and you could be looking at nearly 80 percent overall bandwidth improvements.

This is likely to hit servers at the end of 2019, with desktop applications ramping up mid-to-late 2020. It’s possible, given AMD’s release schedule, that we could see this launch with the Zen 3 architecture, as it will require a new socket, and as Zen 2’s EPYC processors will be backward compatible with current sockets, it’s unlikely Threadripper 3 and Ryzen 3 will require new sockets as well.