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Samsung’s new 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM will make your phone smooth like buttah
- Today, Samsung announced it is beginning mass production of new 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM chips.
- These chips will be remarkably faster and more power-efficient than current, LPDDR4 chips.
- Samsung doesn’t give a schedule, but expect some 2019 flagships to have LPDDR5 DRAM inside.
Samsung posted a press release today to unveil its latest advancement in mobile technology: the industry’s first 10-nanometer class 8-gigabit LPDDR5 DRAM.
You may not know what that means. In a nutshell, it means that the next generation of flagship smartphones will be 150 percent faster and consume up to 30 percent less power than today’s flagships.
Right now, the industry standard DRAM used in flagship devices is LPDDR4 which first launched in 2014. You can check out our in-depth breakdown of LPDDR4 here, written by our own Robert Triggs.
LPDDR4, as you would expect, was a significant leap over the previous industry standard, LPDDR3. It looks like the move from LPDDR4 to LPDDR5 will be no different, with Samsung claiming a data rate of up to 6,400 megabits per second, which completely trounces LPDDR4’s maximum of 4,266Mb/s.
How fast is that? Imagine sending over 51GB of data in one second. That’s how fast.
The secret is the fact that the new LPDDR5 chips use 10-nanometer construction, which is much more efficient than the 20nm construction in LPDDR4 chips. The nanometer designation tells us how far apart each node is on a chip: the closer the nodes are, the less energy it takes to transfer information from one node to another, and the less time it takes to move that info. That efficiency results in faster, less-power-hungry smartphones.
Additionally, LPDDR5 chips will offer a “deep sleep mode,” which cuts the power usage when your phone is idle. Samsung claims this will be 50 percent more efficient than the current “idle mode” featured on LPDDR4 chips.
With all this power, speed, and efficiency, the next generation of flagship smartphones will be able to handle processor-heavy tasks with ease, such as AI and machine learning applications, and ultra-high definition (UHD) video playback.
Samsung doesn’t say which future devices will have LPDDR5 DRAM, but it’s a good bet that a 2019 Samsung flagship like the Samsung Galaxy S10 or Samsung Galaxy Note 10 will run on LPDDR5. According to Samsung, it will begin mass production “in line with the demands of global customers.”
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