Samsung Announces 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM For Mobile Devices
by Brandon Chester on September 8, 2015 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- DDR4
Today Samsung Electronics announced that they have begun mass production of the memory industry's first 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM on their 20nm manufacturing process. These new chips offer 50% greater density than Samsung's existing 8Gb chips.
The production of 12Gb chips opens up the possibility of smartphones and tablets with 6GB of RAM using a four 12Gb chip DRAM package, as well as 3GB using just two chips in a package. A 6GB package would also only take up the same amount of space as existing 3GB packages which use 6Gb chips. The new 12Gb chips also end up being very slightly more than 30% faster than their 8Gb chips, with a per-pin speed of 4266Mbps which would give 34Gbps of bandwidth over a 64bit bus. With Samsung beginning mass production of this new memory it's only a matter of time before we start to see more devices move from 2GB to 3GB and from 4GB to 6GB of RAM.
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Shadow7037932 - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
What's the difference between this LPDDR4 and the LPDDR4 that'll be used with say Skylake?secretmanofagent - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I could be wrong, but Skylake doesn't seem to support LPDDR4, just DDR4. http://anandtech.com/show/9582/intel-skylake-mobil...makerofthegames - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Correct. Skylake supports DDR4, DDR3L, or on some models, LPDDR3. It's a limited voltage range, basically - DDR4 and LPDDR3 are 1.2V, and DDR3L is 1.35V. LPDDR4 is 1.1V - I don't see why it wouldn't be incompatible with Skylake, but they've announced no support for it. Maybe only on the tablet-aimed chips?Shadow7037932 - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Thanks. You are correct.Pneumothorax - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Looking forward to smartphones getting 6gb of ram. Too bad cheap ass Apple, who's releasing a $749 "flagship phone" tomorrow with a paltry 16gb of flash, won't be putting 3gb in their phone until the next decade lol.RussianSensation - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
It's even worse since they are upgrading the camera from 8MP to 12MP and adding 4K video capability which means to actually use these upgraded features, one would run out of space even quicker with just a 16GB model. They are basically banking on making an extra $80+ when users end up stepping up to the 64GB model out of necessity. Pure money grab.ThisIsChrisKim - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
Well, Apple is, first and foremost, a business.smartthanyou - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I am guessing since the iPhone and iOS perform better with their "low" amounts of RAM than most Android flagships phones do with more RAM they don't feel the pressure to upgrade their devices.Maybe when Android phones start performing much better with their high end hardware Apple will feel the need to up their game. And you are probably right, that won't happen until next decade.
menting - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
smartthanyou, so you're pretty much saying they were stupid to put in 2GB of RAM in their iPads. It's pretty much the same thing as an iPhone, just in a larger package.airmanchairman - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
The new Slideover, split-screen and Picture-in-Picture features of the latest iPads clearly justify the increased RAM in Apple's latest iPads, duh!