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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jive - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
Yes, power is a problem, as DRAM can not be powered down like one can for grapchics and compute sections. My home computer has 4GB memory. Where an earth would mobile device require 6GB memory?I think we move forward when cumpute platforms move over to unified memory when phase shift, mram or xpoint technology replaces traditional division between mass storage and main memory.
Eden-K121D - Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - link
You never know about the futureCaedenV - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
isn't the bigger deal here that it essentially halves the pcb area required to make a 3GB phone freeing up space for other things like battery?Better yet, can we get a cheap x86 windows tablet with more than 2GB of ram with this? Or will this not work with AMD/Intel controllers? I would just love to see something like a T100 with 3 of these modules getting above that 4GB barrier of usefulness in a Windows tablet.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
It won't work with the currently announced Intel chips. Maybe a future Atom chip will support it.Smudgeous - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
All 4 of the current Braswell Atom processors (mobile/desktop) support 8GB of DDR3L, and all but the weakest Cherry Trail (tablet) ones support 8GB of LPDDR3. The upcoming Apollo Lake, which replaces Braswell, is supposed to support LPDDR4. While the mobile/desktop Atoms do carry a much higher TDP than the tablet ones (4W vs 2W), a Windows tablet that's 10" or larger should be fine dissipating that heat.jwcalla - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
I thought phones used a PoP methodology where the RAM is sandwiched right on top of the processor?Eden-K121D - Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - link
they do