A couple of years ago, Samsung announced 8.5Gbps LPDDR5X RAM that at the time was the fastest in the world. Technology progress marches on and today the company unveiled an even faster LPDDR5X.
It runs at 10.7Gbps, surpassing the 9.6Gbps LPDDR5T variant that was introduced by SK Hynix last year. This represents a 25% increase in performance over the previous X variants, but speed isn’t the only upgrade.
Samsung is building these chips on a 12nm class process, which means that the chips are smaller. This allowed the company to increase capacity by 30% and is now building 32GB packages with it.
Of course, this product is advertised for AI applications. If you’ve been following the topic, you know that large models require tons of memory – even top of the line GPUs like the Nvidia RTX 4090 is limited in what it can run with its 24GB of VRAM. Nvidia offers professional cards with a lot more VRAM, but you don’t want to know how much they cost.
Anyway, that is not the end of it either. With new power saving tech, the new LPDDR5X chips can reduce power usage by 25% and can enter low-power mode for extended periods. This is a boon for battery-powered mobile devices but also servers (the electricity bill is a large part of the running cost for servers).
Samsung will start mass production of the 10.7Gbps LPDDR5X RAM by the second half of this year, pending testing with mobile chipsets. The company is also working on next-generation LPDDR6 RAM.
