With the recently launched DDR5, it seems like talking about future memory standards is a long way off, but Samsung at Tech Day 2021 gave details on the future of RAM. Where they talked about DDR6, DDR6 + and even GDDR7 memory with predictions regarding their specs. What will future RAM look like for CPU and GPU?
Every now and then a new generation of RAM appears, which allows higher bandwidths to be achieved than the previous ones, because if this component did not scale it would end up being a bottleneck in terms of CPU performance. New manufacturing nodes not only allow the development of better processors, but also new memory standards.
The future of RAM according to Samsung
On its Tech Day 2021, the South Korean multinational gave new data on the future DDR6, of which we knew little, such as the adoption of the PAM-4 coding as in GDDR6X as long as the memory controller clock speed is not increased too much and the power consumption per transmitted bit does not skyrocket.
What data does Samsung have on the future DDR6? Well, the RAM memory modules that will go from the 12,800 Gbps base speed and 17 Gbps overclock. Although for now we have to keep in mind that this is only Samsung’s vision for the next dual rate memory standard and we will have to wait a few more years for the final JEDEC approved standard. . In any case, this proposal assumes a lower clock speed than current DDR5.
On the other hand, they also talked about memories like LPDDR6 and GDDR7, in the latter case they are talking about speeds of up to 32 Gbps and the implementation of a technology that Samsung has dubbed real time error protection function which at the moment has not been described.
HBM3 will arrive next year
Another announcement Samsung made on the future of RAM concerns HBM3 memory, which it hopes will run with bandwidths of up to 819 GB / s and be put on sale somewhere in 2022. This indicates that the HBM3 standard would already be finalized, since Samsung is with SK Hynix the second manufacturer to announce that it has modules of this type of memory ready for production.
The HBM3 will not be used for the home market, but it is widely used in the server world, especially in HPC GPUs, so there is a possibility that a future architecture will use the new memory standard. At the moment, we know that Intel Ponte Vecchio and AMD Instinct MI200 will use HBM2E memory. Will NVIDIA be the first to use HBM3 memory in its future high performance architecture? Who knows though, as happened with the GDDR6X, it’s possible that Hopper is even using a third-generation version of HBM that hasn’t yet been standardized.
