When DDR4 was announced, there were three key points that it was meant to address: higher memory densities resulting in higher-capacity DIMMs, lower power consumption, and improved performance.
At first, though, not all DDR4 memory managed to achieve all three points, but it seems that Samsung has now managed to do so. The company announced that it is now mass-producing 8 Gb DDR4 memory based on its 20 nm manufacturing process. Samsung already started production of 32 GB modules earlier this month, and they run at 2400 MHz, as opposed to the 1866 MHz frequency of the company's DDR3 server memory modules.
"Our new 20 nm 8 Gb DDR4 DRAM more than meets the high performance, high density and energy efficiency needs that are driving the proliferation of next-generation enterprise servers," said Jeeho Baek, Vice President of Memory Marketing at Samsung Electronics. "By expanding the production of our 20 nm DRAM line-ups, we will provide premium, high-density DRAM products, while handling increasing demand from customers in the global premium enterprise market."
The new 8 Gb DDR4 memory chips will also allow for up to 128 GB per DDR4 module by using 3D through silicon technology, which will make some very high-capacity memory configurations possible. (Think terabyte territory.) Such amounts of memory might not be interesting to consumers, but in the enterprise environment, having a lavish amount of memory for a server to play with can be very valuable. The DDR4 memory modules run at 1.2 V, which is the upper limit of the DDR4 reference specifications.
On the DDR3 front, Samsung also started production of 4 Gb per chip DDR3 at 20 nm, as well as 6 Gb for LPDDR3 for mobile devices.
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