Is ddr5 ram avaiable at the moment?

lukasic2

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Nov 10, 2011
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So we were talking about ps4,me and my friend,and then i said that the ddr 5 ram is gonna be the most expensive part and that it'll be awesome...He said that i'm wrong,and that he has 8 gb ddr5 in his PC and that he got it for 60$....I'm totally puzzled here,i'm sure he wouldn't lie,so i think he's just wrong but he's totally convinced....Are there any motherboards that support ddr5 at all?Is he wrong?
 

InvalidError

Titan
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DDR5 does not exist yet and most likely won't become an official standard for another 3-4 years.

DDR4 is not available on mainstream desktops either - no mainstream CPU supporting it exist yet and DRAM manufacturers have yet to start mass-producing it. Haswell's refresh next year MAY have DDR4 support or Broadwell after it. So, mainstream DDR4 is not going to happen until late-2014 at best.

GPU cards often have GDDR5 but that would be a completely different story. Some GPUs have up to 4GB GDDR5 and you would need two of those to have 8GB total GDDR5 in a system. You would have to spend around $1000 on GPUs to get there.

So if your friend got 8GB RAM for $60, he is most certainly talking about DDR3.
 

Wolfshadw

Titan
Moderator
Graphic card memory has reached DDR5 levels (GDDR5).
System memory is still only at DDR3 levels.

If you're friend is telling you that he has 8GB of DDR5 RAM in his system, he's either lying or just plain mistaken. More than likely, he has 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a GDDR5 RAM capable graphics card installed .

-Wolf sends
 

They have started mass-producing it, but it's all going into servers initially. Consumers probably won't see much of it before 2015.
 

GDDR5 is modified DDR3, so they are on the same "level".
 

lukasic2

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I know what gddr5 is,he has a gddr5 GPU...I also thought he had ddr3 ram,although i never heard about ddr4 before?Is the ddr5 ram in ps4 gonna be much faster than i thought?
 

DDR4 is going to replace DDR3, but it's not available in shops yet and no current motherboards or CPUs are compatible with it.

The GDDR5 in the PS4 isn't anything special. It's slightly slower than what currently goes into the average PC graphics card.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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There is no such thing as GDDR5 being "modified DDR3", all SDRAM is fundamentally the same as the old PC66 SDRAM from 15+ years ago. The only differences are a few die shrinks, voltage tweaks and which bus front-end gets slapped on the DRAM matrix which has remained fundamentally unchanged for the past 30 years.

They don't use DDR3 and convert it to GDDR5. They rip the DDR3 front-end off and replace it with GDDR5. The rest is the same regardless of it being DDR2/3/4, GDDR3/5 or whatever else, give or take some voltage range compatibility restrictions.
 

It was developed by modifying DDR3 with some bandwidth-oriented features etc. It is otherwise very similar - uses the same voltages and so on.

Of course it isn't actually produced by making DDR3 and then modifying it - that was how it was DEVELOPED.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator

Except most of that development has absolutely nothing to do with either DDR3, GDDR5, XDR or whatever else specifically.

To "transform" DDR3 into GDDR5, XDR or whatever other odd standard of the day, you have to rip just about everything that makes DDR3 out of DDR3 and replace it with GDDR5's (or whatever else's) equivalent circuitry.

DDR3 may have the credit as the "primary test vessel" for the underlying DRAM matrix shrink but nothing more than that.