Leaked Intel Barlow Pass DIMM Slide Shows 3200MT/s Support, 15W TDP

A new leaked slide shows that Intel’s upcoming Barlow Pass DIMMs will support 3200MT/s DDR4 with a 15W TDP. Intel further claims a 15% bandwidth improvement for the Optane persistent memory platform for Cooper Lake and Ice Lake.

The Barlow Pass slide comes courtesy of Twitter leaker @KOMACHI_ENSAKA. Barlow Pass will succeed Cascade Lake’s Apache Pass, which was Intel’s first generation of Optane persistent memory DIMMs, which are pin-compatible with DDR4. It is based on Intel’s non-volatile 3D XPoint. Barlow Pass will be based on second-generation 3D XPoint, which doubles bit density to four layers.

Most notably, the slide shows that Barlow Pass will have a 15W TDP and support for up to 3200MT/s DDR4. It will also have a 15% higher bandwidth. This would be a notable improvement over Cascade Lake, which has to clock down RAM to 2666MT/s to match Apache Pass.

The slide further shows two versions of Barlow Pass. One for the Whitley platform and one for the Cedar Island platform, with the Cedar Island platform only supporting up to 2933MT/s (with 3200MT/s being a stretch target, according to the small print). Whitley will support up to 4TB per socket and has four two-channel IMCs.

Per a leak from last year, Whitley will be the mainstream platform for Cooper Lake and Ice Lake-SP this year, while Cedar Island is targeted at 4S and 8S platforms, respectively with 8-channel and 6-channel memory support (as is confirmed in the slide).

Lastly, the slide says that Barlow Pass will be productized with a “blue-colored full DIMM heat spreader” which is meant serve for better identification in the data center.

According to Intel’s 2019 annual report, Barlow Pass is expected to reach PRQ status in 2020, the last step before commercial shipments, but didn’t confirm a launch this year.