Faster is better with many things in life, including today's topic, DDR5 memory.
So let's get right into it. DDR5 is expected to be twice as fast as DDR4,
which mainstream PCs have been using for years now.
Initially, the manufacturing goal for DDR5 was to run kits at 4,800 megahertz,
which is double DDR4's standard speed of 2,400 megahertz.
But of course, many of us are running our DDR4 kits
at 3,000 megahertz and beyond today,
meaning the stock improvements don't seem to be that impressive at face value.
That's why the powers that be decided to kick it up a notch
and SK Hynex, a major manufacturer of DRAM, has come out and stated it wants to roll out kits
that can get up to 8,400 megahertz.
Whoa. But realistically, consumers looking to snag some memory
for their home systems should get used to seeing kits somewhere in the 4,800 to 6,400 megahertz range.
With DDR5 8,400, mostly being targeted at the server market.
And regardless of what speed you get, DDR5 can be accessed while some of its memory banks
are being refreshed, which should cut down on latency and further improve performance.
But as is tradition, higher speeds will counterintuitively
come with lower power consumption thanks to shrinking transistor sizes.
The standard voltage for DDR5 is going to be just 1.1 volts
down from the reference of 1.2 volts in DDR4.
And although this isn't going to mean a ton for desktop computing, lower power consumption overall
should help extend the battery life of mobile devices
at least a little bit. Another result of smaller transistors is greater density.
And I don't mean that your memory modules will sink faster
in a cup of water. I'm talking about storage density. How many gigabytes each module can hold?
This is expected to roughly double. So you might see 16 Gigabyte sticks
become a lot more common than they are right now. But hold on a minute there, Jamesy boy.
You're talking about DDR5 like it's something coming out in the future, even though you've seen
that you can get your hands on it right now. What's up with that?
Well, here's the thing. Just like many other kinds of bleeding edge tech,
availability for Joe consumer will effectively be non-existent
for some time. Although we have seen variants of DDR5 incorporated
into high-end smartphones, you can't yet get your hands
on a couple of sticks for your desktop PC. There isn't a current consumer platform that supports it.
And next generations of both Intel and AMD CPUs do out later this year are still going
to be based around DDR4. Indeed, aside from the aforementioned smartphones
that will benefit from DDR5's lower power consumption, we're more likely to see DDR5 show up in servers first,
as DDR5 has more robust error checking capabilities
than older generations of RAM, which will be useful for data operations that need
to be up and running basically all the time.
Current market estimates don't expect DDR5 to really start becoming widespread in consumer PCs
or servers until late 2021. And it will likely represent less than half of the DRAM market
until at least mid 2022. So don't wait around for DDR5 platform to come out
if you're thinking about upgrading your rig or you're building a new one this year.
But that isn't to say that it won't be a cool piece of tech when it does come out, especially as AMD's new CPU
architectures have made RAM performance a lot more important than it was just a few years ago.
I'm just hoping that when DDR5 does become the standard,
roller coaster RAM prices won't force me to take out a sketchy paycheck alone just
to get my hands on some. The interest rates is so high.
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And as always, hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions of topics that we
should cover in the future.