Samsung Announces 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM For Mobile Devices
by Brandon Chester on September 8, 2015 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- DDR4
Today Samsung Electronics announced that they have begun mass production of the memory industry's first 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM on their 20nm manufacturing process. These new chips offer 50% greater density than Samsung's existing 8Gb chips.
The production of 12Gb chips opens up the possibility of smartphones and tablets with 6GB of RAM using a four 12Gb chip DRAM package, as well as 3GB using just two chips in a package. A 6GB package would also only take up the same amount of space as existing 3GB packages which use 6Gb chips. The new 12Gb chips also end up being very slightly more than 30% faster than their 8Gb chips, with a per-pin speed of 4266Mbps which would give 34Gbps of bandwidth over a 64bit bus. With Samsung beginning mass production of this new memory it's only a matter of time before we start to see more devices move from 2GB to 3GB and from 4GB to 6GB of RAM.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
37 Comments
View All Comments
id4andrei - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
They perform so well that they're unable to hold more than 2 safari tabs loaded.Pneumothorax - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
Here's the thing, even with my (work-provided) iPad Air 2 with 2 gb of ram, it's already having to constantly re-load large web pages when switching tabs for me and my medical charting app. I would welcome 6gb of ram any day.It's hilarious how the apple sheep defend their paltry ram stating the reason for 1gb of ram on the original 6/6+ was that '2gb of RAM uses a ton of more battery than 1gb of ram'. Stupid stupid stupid. It's planned obsolescence, idiots! Besides, having to constantly fire up the wifi/LTE radios kill the battery much faster than extra ram ever would.
airmanchairman - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
Wake up, update iOS to 9.0 and smell the coffee dude (Slideover, Split-Screen and Picture-in-Picture, among lots of other goodies within Safari, Notes, Search, Maps etc).osxandwindows - Monday, September 28, 2015 - link
Its iOS not the ram, pc with 2gb of ram can keep multiple tabs openjonminchoi - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
I haven't used Android so I can't correctly say, but all of my coworkers are sporting LG G3's at the office, and they don't seem to run into any lag during usage.Personally, I think iOS devices could use a little bit more RAM than currently implemented, so they hold their values longer for the power users.
Morawka - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
they gotta make people upgrade their phones at least once every 3 years, else people would just keep the same phone for 5 years or long.. It's a intentional handicap, one they can manipulate by making iOS 9, iOS 10, etc.. use more ramsonicmerlin - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I really, really hope Apple steps up their mobile devices to 3 GB in a year or two instead of waiting another 3 years to jump to 4 GB.frostyfiredude - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Considering how long they're sticking with 1GB and how few RAM devouring features they have left to implement, they won't be in any rush. I fully expect Apple to sit on 2GB for atleast 3 years and move to 4GB in 2022.frostyfiredude - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
6GB in a phone or ARM tablet is nuts! The BoM increase over 4GB would be much better suited to something noticeable like better quality NAND at this point IMO. Hoping this is used more for upcoming LPDDR4 support in laptops and servers and lowering cost of having 3GB in mobile.Samus - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
With 4K resolution filtering down to the tablet and (for some ungodly reason) the smartphone market, 4GB of RAM is going to be essential to driving those displays. Remember, SoC GPU's use shared system memory as texture cache and other GPU duties. Considering how powerful GPU's are becoming in the mobile market, it won't be long before we have Battlefield 4 and GTA V (AAA) level games on smartphones.