SK hynix will begin production of DDR5 this year

According to an update on its website blog page, SK hynix will start mass production of its 10nm-class 16Gb DDR5 memory chip this year and is expecting DDR5 to account for 22% of the total DRAM market by 2021 and up to 43% of the market by 2022.

DDR5 aims to further reduce power consumption per bandwidth by over 20% compared to DDR4, this is achieved in part by a lower voltage of 1.1V in DDR5. On-die error correction code and error check and scrubs have been adopted by DDR5 to allow for improved reliability by correcting single bit errors on chip. This technology will be built into every DDR5 die, something which may contribute to cost reductions in the future.

“DDR5 will also offer a wider range of density based on 16Gb and even 24Gb monolithic die, in order to meet the needs of cloud service customers. By supporting higher density and performance scalability compared to its predecessor, DDR5 has set a firm foothold to lead the era of big data and AI. With this, SK hynix will secure a competitive edge in the premium server market while providing distinguished memory solutions to customers,” said Sungsoo Ryu, Head of DRAM Product Planning at SK hynix.

As well as offering improvements in power efficiency and reliability, DDR5 will deliver increased performance compared with DDR4. Flexibility of the DDR5 standard will allow manufacturers to produce memory modules with a range of frequency between 3200 – 8400 Mbps and in single die densities of 8Gb, 16Gb, 24Gb, 32Gb and 64Gb.

4800 Mbps DDR5 is expected to become the mainstream choice of manufacturers initially and will offer a 1.5x faster transfer rate compared to DDR4-3200, with 38.4 GBps bandwidth which is 38% higher than DDR4-3200. DDR5 chips use a 32 bank configuration with banks split into eight groups to help achieve this performance improvement, DDR4 uses 16 banks but with the same bank refresh.

SK hynix states in the recent online blog that it will begin production of its DDR5 memory chips this year, to meet the increasing demand from the industry, while continuing to research and develop future DRAM technology.

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KitGuru says: It feels as though DDR4 has been around forever, so the switch to DDR5 will be a welcome performance boost. Which desktop PC platform do you guys expect to be the first to adopt the DDR5 memory standard?

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