New Samsung DRAM Boasts of 12.8GB/s Transfers
Samsung’s been pretty busy with its successful Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets, along with the Nexus S, but the company this morning reminded us all that it’s not been resting on its laurels when it comes to hardware.
Samsung today revealed that it’s developed a 1GB DRAM for mobile devices that boasts a wide I/O interface and low power consumption to boot. The new mobile DRAM is capable of transmitting data at 12.8GB per second, an eightfold increase in bandwidth when compared to mobile DDR DRAM, and it’s made possible by the use of 512 pins for data input and output compared to the last-gen mobile DRAMs’ 32 pins. All this comes with a reduction in power consumption amounting to roughly 87 percent.
"Following the development of 4Gb LPDDR2 DRAM (low-power DDR2 dynamic random access memory) last year, our new mobile DRAM solution with a wide I/O interface represents a significant contribution to the advancement of high-performance mobile products," said Byungse So, senior VP of memory product planning and application engineering at Samsung Electronics.
"We will continue to aggressively expand our high-performance mobile memory product line to further propel the growth of the mobile industry," he continued.
Samsung’s next move is to provide 20nm-class 4Gb wide I/O mobile DRAM sometime in 2013.

It is right, although my mind does become befuddled when I think what practical uses a 12.8GB/sec transfer on a phone might be. Any suggestions?
so my girlfriend can play the new angry birds... in all seriousness that sounds like an insane amount of bandwidth for a smartphone.Maybe new mobile GPUs will need more bandwidth when they are used in tablets with the larger resolution
Considering most phone 3d "gpu"'s (not that i really consider a phones gpu worthy of the name gpu but that don't belong here) lacks dedicated memory it would soon become a bottleneck when for instance outputting 3d on a higher res external display. Other that that it seems like overkill for a phone when their cpu's have so limited I/O as well as computational power.
Most computer systems beside those basic ones that still uses normal memory for 3d graphics would gain little benefit from much faster ram, not enough to make it worthwhile for the big corporations to spend loads of green into the r&d.
The x86 prefetchers for instance do a great job at mitigating that otherwise bottleneck. Try use your mem at 1/2 speed and test some real world scenarios and see the result! Its amazing whet clever engineering can do!
I don't about you, but I sure as hell don't mind EXTRA speed. Would you mind gaming with a 6-core i7 980x at 4.5GHz? No game is going to take full advantage of that chip, but you certainly wouldn't complain about it.
That being said, I agree with saturnus that the mobile industry is really stepping its game up. Hopefully we can merge some of its technologies over here on the desktop side. Not that I don't love the idea of having a beastly tower under my desktop. I would just enjoy a little downsizing.
I feel like with the technology we have in phones there is NO reason our powerhouse desktops should be so HUGE and consume so much power. These tiny little handheld smartphones have insanely low power consumption for their performance. Not to mention both power consumption/performance is improving at an astonishing rate. Yet we still have people packing 1000W PSU's in the FULL SIZE towers, granted its for tri-sli for the most powerful GPU's on the planet, but it still blows my mind how these fastly improving smartphones consume a fraction of the power, are completely FANLESS, all in a tiny form factor.
I'd say it's about time we start downsize our desktops. SSD's are a great step towards this, extremely high performance(and price
Am I crazy to think this? I don't know, it just seems like gaming PC's have been stagnant in the last 5-10 years in terms of size/power consumption/heat. Hardware has definitely been improving, but with such great improvements in efficiency these large towers should be a thing of the past.
this is because the cpu r still stuck on the crappy old school x86
It certainly will add some space for traces on the board, but the controller shouldn't need to be that much larger to add more traces. Most mobile devices had been moving towards SOC style things, so future mobile cpus might need to be designed for this.
On tablets where this might be geared for, it won't be too big of an issue. Smartphones might have trouble, but I wager this isn't really designed for small smartphones.
You're confused, badly. Prefetchers aren't part of programming, it's part of hardware. They have been around since 8086, but what makes memory less important is caches, which make reads to main memory relatively infrequent. Also, a cache always reads in a line, so in a sense that's prefetching, but also, since the Tualatin, the processors prefetch lines as well.
With more cores per processor, bandwidth becomes more important as well. If you're one processor and you've got say seven more, you don't want to be hogging the memory bus. If you are, then they're all waiting. Faster bandwidth means you get release it sooner, and let another core have it, if necessary. It also allows for larger cache lines, if that's desirable in the situation, without unduly increasing the time it takes to read it in.
grab a piece of paper, fold it 8 times, see how many you get. Is it equal to multiplying it by 8 times instead?
You can fold a standard piece of paper 8 times? Impressive!