A global leader in developing open standards and publications for the microelectronics industry JDEC has just announced the completion of its last revision for the new 5th generation DDR5 memory standard.
DDR5’s maximum die density will be 64Gbit whereas DDR4 has just 16Gbit. The maximum capacity for standard DIMMs will be 128GB with speeds up to DDR5-6400. Each DIMM will contain two 32-bit memory channels unlike a single 64-bit channel on DDR4 DIMMs with burst length doubled to 16.
Vdd and Vddq voltages have dropped from DDR4s 1.2v to 1.1v for DDR5. That’s not a big drop as it was with DDR3 and DDR4 (1.5v to 1.2v).
The advantages of the new DDR5 standard lies in lower power consumption higher density and bandwidth. Even though JDEC has set limitations for DDR5 standard, memory manufacturers will probably push these limits as Hynix already announced its plans for DDR5-8400.
As it usually takes 12-18 months for the new DDR standard to hit the markets, we can probably expect DDR5 modules during the next year. As always DDR5 will be released for servers first followed by the desktop hardware.