did you ever suddenly wake up and realize holy smokes that thing that felt like
yesterday was seven years ago that's
ddr4 i know right 2014 this stuff came out
see you later cause there's a new kid in town ddr5 desktop platforms are right
around the corner and it's time to meet the fifth generation memory technology
that's going to be juicing up our speeds and our capacities for at least the next
few years starting with a physical look at what's different followed by a deeper
dive into what makes this new breed of RAM stand out just like our sponsor
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this is it my first hands-on with a full retail kit
of ddr5 memory on the surface it really
doesn't look very different in fact it even has the same 288 pins as ddr4
memory but don't imagine that you're going to be fitting it into the same slot the key has been moved to prevent
any but the most determined users from managing to mix up their memory
generations and for good reason one of the biggest
changes from ddr4 is immediately visible
on our bare board here look at this the power management integrated circuit or
pmic has been moved from the motherboard to the memory module itself now the pmix
role is to take one of the standard output voltages from your computer power
supply in this case 5 volts and convert
it to the lower 1.1 volts that are required by the ddr5 chips here on the
module this move was absolutely key to making the signal integrity improvements
that were required to ramp ddr5 up to speeds 50 higher than last gen and even
beyond if this alleged leaked roadmap is to be believed one curious side effect
of this though is that even though ddr5 runs at nearly 10 percent lower voltages
than ddr4 which should lower power draw the onboard pmic is not going to operate
at 100 efficiency meaning that we could actually end up needing to deal with a
small amount of waste heat on each module g-scale assures me though that
it's unlikely we'll see a return to those clip-on RAM fans from the ddr2
days those things really sucked they were loud and the fans failed all the
time another side effect of moving the pmic on module is that it adds cost to
the individual modules so once you also
account for the more complicated pcb design and the early adopter tax you can
expect ddr5 modules to be significantly more expensive than ddr4 modules of the
same capacity now in theory some of this
cost should be offset by removing power management from the motherboard but i've
only rarely seen motherboards get cheaper from one generation to the next
and in light of the ongoing worldwide semiconductor shortage not to mention
the inclusion of pci express gen 5 on these upcoming platforms which has its
own costly trace routing challenges i will be pretty surprised if it happens
this time the good news though is ddr5 comes with some pretty spectacular
benefits that aren't immediately obvious on a spec sheet like i'd forgive you for
looking at the launch jdeck ddr5 frequency of 4 800 mega transfers per
second and thinking wow that sounds pretty unexceptional
compared to something like this g skill kid on new egg that's rated at a
blistering 5300 mega megatransfers per second especially considering that cast
latency or the number of RAM cycles to fulfill a data request is expected to be
in the neighborhood of double compared to last gen but here's the thing
remember that video we did recently explaining how frequency alone doesn't
paint the full picture of performance well for one thing the memory controller
in your ddr4 compatible CPU it wasn't designed with these kinds of speeds in
mind so as with any form of overclocking it's a bit of a crap shoot whether it'll
even work with super fast modules like those ones and for another past a
certain point there are actually internal bottlenecks on the memory ics
that's the chips on the module that would prevent them from properly taking
advantage of any additional speed anyway this part's a little complicated but
bear with me internally each ic has these two-dimensional grids of bits you
know zeros and ones and they're called banks these banks get bundled into bank
groups and to explain it simply whenever a bank group fires off the data
requested by the CPU that bank group needs a little bit of time to recover
during that time the other bank groups fire one after the other to fill up a
burst buffer you can think of it kind of like a minigun where each barrel is a
bank group and the bullets are data bits firing into the buffer except
what happens if the module is running at such a high speed that we roll back
around to our first bank group before it's recovered that's a problem
that could be the bottleneck so to solve it ddr5 doubles the number of bank
groups from four to eight that gives each bank group way more time to cool
down and pretty much guarantees that we'll be able to properly take advantage
of speeds well beyond the 6 000 or so
mega transfers per second of first generation oc kits like this trident z5
here and it gets even more interesting if you're into this sort of thing which
you obviously are because you've made it this far the thing is while the minigun
analogy helps us to understand bank group cooldowns in the real world it
would be terribly inefficient to transfer ones and zeros to the CPU
individually so instead let's imagine that our minigun is shooting all of
these bits into an intermediary buffer called the burst buffer and we can think
of this kind of like firing a single shotgun
shell full of bits over to the CPU all at once a bit more impactful right now
ddr4 modules are linked to the CPU with
a single 64-bit bus or communication
channel and they have a burst length of eight so we could say that our fully
automatic ddr4 shotgun here fires 64
pellet rounds with an eight round magazine bang bang bang bang bang bang
bang bang so 64 bits times eight rounds gives us a
total of 64 bytes of data per burst
before it needs to be reloaded by our bank groups follow so far
good ddr5 modules change this up in a
big way instead of that single 64-bit
bus we actually have two 32-bit
sub-channels that can operate independently so back to our shotgun
here we fire smaller shells with only 32
bits each but we double our burst length
or our magazine capacity to 16 per burst
so if we math it up here again 32 bits
times a burst length of 16 that is 64
bytes per burst just like ddr4
except now we've got two barrels that
can fire independently each with its own
16 round magazine but don't get carried away this isn't
dual channel and you don't get to just add that total theoretical capacity
together to boost your memory bandwidth you're still going to want to run
multiple ddr5 modules in dual channel mode or
more channels in the workstation and server space the real benefit of these
independent sub channels is efficiency and latency in ddr4 if you only have 32
bits of data in the burst buffer you just have to fill the rest with junk
before you ship it out to the CPU that takes time and it means that the CPU has
to wait around well now you don't have to wait you can just send 32 bits if
that's all that's needed right now and the CPU won't have to wait around and
there's more ddr5 ics so again that's
the individual memory chips themselves now contain a basic form of ecc or error
correction that operates completely transparently to the end user it can't
be disabled and it serves to improve stability during high speed data storage
and transfers within the ic honestly
this was way overdue in my opinion but i'm still grateful we're finally getting
it especially considering that unregistered ddr5 dimms you know the
kind that just goes in your regular desktop computer are expected to hit
capacities of 128 gigabytes on a single stick
and load reduced dimms are potentially able to go as high as four terabytes per
module with a combination of improved density and dye stacking in the coming
years but let's slow down for a second in spite of its benefits ddr5 isn't some
kind of magic silver bullet either and at the same frequency let's say 4 800
mega transfers per second overclock spec ddr4 is actually expected to outperform
this bass spec ddr5 well no problem you might think you'll just want to
overclock the snot out of your ddr5 and go faster right
might not be quite that simple remember the on module power management ic well
as it turns out there are two different types of them
one is not designed to go higher than
the default of 1.1 to about
1.435 volts the other kind which has to
be specifically built onto your module at the time of construction is a
programmable mode one that can go as high as well there doesn't seem to be a
set limit for that one so expect to see some pretty exotic modules down the line
and some pretty exotic cooling on them truthfully even the non-oc modules
should end up being pretty interesting since ddr5 is also getting an spd or
speed chip facelift instead of just storing default
frequency and latency values which is usually going to contain both a stock
and an overclocked or xmp setting it now also handles signaling to the power
management ic and to any other microcontrollers on the module like RGB
lighting controllers so i'm expecting that to directly result in more creative
lighting implementations than we've ever seen before and
lord knows that is what the industry needs more RGB i saved the best for
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new customer at the links down below if you're looking for another video to
watch maybe check out our most recent look into how memory speed impacts
performance particularly in gaming