Wow, it's been seven years already? SK Hynix announces DDR5 in production.

[williamcll]

DDR5 has been under works since last year and SK hynix has announced that it has finally made it into mass production. It will be available in the enterprise space first.

Quote

Since SK hynix announced the development of World’s First 16 Gigabit (Gb) DDR5 DRAM on November 2018, the Company has provided its major partners including Intel with sample products, and has completed various tests and verification of its functions and compatibility. This will allow SK hynix to provide its customers with the products once the DDR5 market becomes active.

 

SK hynix’s DDR5 supports transfer rate of 4,800 ~ 5,600 Megabit-per-second (Mbps), which is 1.8 times faster than the previous generation – DDR4. It can transmit 9 full-HD (FHD) movies (5GB each) per second with 5,600Mbps transfer rate. Its operating voltage is 1.1V being lowered from 1.2V of DDR4, which means that its power consumption is reduced by 20%. Another notable specification of the Company’s DDR5 is Error Correcting Code (ECC) inside the chip that can correct even 1-bit-level errors by itself. With the ECC, the reliability of applications will be increased by 20 times. The Company’s DDR5 also could build up to 256 Gigabyte (GB) capacity applying through-silicon-via (TSV) technology.

Source: https://news.skhynix.com/sk-hynix-launches-worlds-first-ddr5-dram/
Thoughts: Considering how volatile DRAM prices could be, I would imagine the amount of time until this gets into consumer space at a low cost will still be a year or two. Reading the article I've also noticed that there were no mentions of AMD or ARM so that is a bit of worry. One more note is that from another article, it is said some of the RAM have Latencies of up to 30ns, would that be an impact?

[Lurick]

Who cut a slice out of the bottom part of the RAM?!?!

 

 

 

/s

[Senzelian]

That's one weird article.
First they're talking about 16 Gigabit and afterwards about 4.8-5.6Gbit. And the capacity in the chart is also given in Gbit.

 

Wut?!

 

One more thing I have to add:
DDR5 supports on-die ECC. CPU support won't be necessary anymore for ECC as it seems.

 

And the spec lists up to 8400Mhz. Maybe we'll see some 10Ghz DDR5?!  
From the german wikipedia website:

[Letgomyleghoe.]

Question

How does enterprise already have this? I'm pretty sure current epycs and xeons don't support it.

[tim0901]

19 minutes ago, Gundar said:

Question

How does enterprise already have this? I'm pretty sure current epycs and xeons don't support it.

Intel and AMD aren't the only CPU manufacturers. For example IBM's POWER10 processor, due to be released 2H2021, has already been announced and will support DDR5 (and PCIe Gen 5).

[CarlBar]

47 minutes ago, Gundar said:

Question

How does enterprise already have this? I'm pretty sure current epycs and xeons don't support it.

 

Custom skews for that specific customer.

[Delicieuxz]

Is there any mention of what it costs enterprises to purchase right now?

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Gundar said:

Question

How does enterprise already have this? I'm pretty sure current epycs and xeons don't support it.

It's basically one of two things. ARM or Intel/AMD are making custom hardware. I've only ever seen custom Intel hardware and not AMD but it's possible. The NSA has a custom Intel CPU I have never seen before and it was only manufactured for that one cluster and never again. 

[Vanderburg]

6 hours ago, williamcll said:

It can transmit 9 full-HD (FHD) movies (5GB each) per second with 5,600Mbps transfer rate

Wait, wut? This math seems... off. 9*5GB = 45GB = 360Gb... 360Gb/5.6Gbps = ~64s. Am I missing something?

[justpoet]

The whole article appears to be full of really weird math that contradicts itself.  Kinda like whoever wrote it saw some specs and rumors and crammed them together with a PR release while not having a clue what any of it meant or represented.  Somebody get them a better intern.

 

In seriousness though, the fact they can actually produce it well already is great.  That gives us a much higher chance of seeing it along with PCIe 5 in the next AMD/Intel architectures (Zen 4, for example), even if not on consumer platforms to start with then.

[Doobeedoo]

Still far enough from consumer space, total latencies will probably be the same as always. We'll need to wait a bit once available and prices stabilize, what speeds kits will be then. Performance difference. Should be quite interesting, frequency wise memory getting quite fast. 

[porina]

14 hours ago, williamcll said:

Thoughts: Considering how volatile DRAM prices could be, I would imagine the amount of time until this gets into consumer space at a low cost will still be a year or two.

The earliest logical opportunity for consumer systems to move to DDR5 will be end of 2021, early 2022 with Intel Alder Lake or AMD Zen 4.

 

Quote

One more note is that from another article, it is said some of the RAM have Latencies of up to 30ns, would that be an impact?

I'd assume they're talking about JEDEC standard specifications. They include different speed grades. The fastest grades are about the same as the fastest DDR4 latencies. Note in "enthusiast" modules (generally anything with XMP) they can run tighter than official standard. 

 

For example, DDR4-3200 officially goes to CL20. A typical enthusiast module would be CL16, and if you throw more money at it, maybe down as low as CL14. I think we'll see a similar situation with DDR5.

 

13 hours ago, Senzelian said:

DDR5 supports on-die ECC. CPU support won't be necessary anymore for ECC as it seems.

Chip level ECC is to increase the yield of general grade parts, but isn't entirely a replacement for module level ECC. For high reliability systems module level ECC will continue to exist.

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

Is there any mention of what it costs enterprises to purchase right now?

Probably as much as DDR4 did when that first came out, lots. 128GB DDR4 LRDIMM in 2018 was around $2500 each, that also accounts for the largest possible DIMM tax so cost per GB wasn't great on that. Same thing now is only $1000.

[cj09beira]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Probably as much as DDR4 did when that first came out, lots. 128GB DDR4 LRDIMM in 2018 was around $2500 each, that also accounts for the largest possible DIMM tax so cost per GB wasn't great on that. Same thing now is only $1000.

how are 256GB dimms now a days?, i cant even find them on amazon, while they do have 138gb dimms

[tim0901]

8 hours ago, cj09beira said:

how are 256GB dimms now a days?, i cant even find them on amazon, while they do have 138gb dimms

Only place I can find them is asking for £3720 apiece, including tax. That's £3100 pre-tax, which works out at about $4000 apiece compared to ~$2000 for a two stick kit. Pretty hefty markup but given the positioning I can't blame them. To the people interested in such a product, I doubt the price tag matters much to them.

[StDragon]

On 10/10/2020 at 2:31 PM, Senzelian said:

DDR5 supports on-die ECC. CPU support won't be necessary anymore for ECC as it seems.

It's a step up from not having ECC, but it's not a replacement for end-to-end ECC support between the CPU and DIMMs. Meaning, on-die ECC won't address timing error between the DIMM and CPU. However, it would address that rare cosmic ray bit-flip event.

[ouroesa]

Quote

Its operating voltage is 1.1V being lowered from 1.2V of DDR4, which means that its power consumption is reduced by 20%.

Uhm?

Quote

It can transmit 9 full-HD (FHD) movies (5GB each) per second with 5,600Mbps transfer rate

What?

Scary thing is that this comes directly from SK Hynix's own news site. Does not instill confidence. 

[LAwLz]

Their math is correct, it's just that when they write 5,600Mbps they mean per pin, and then in the middle of the sentence they start talking about the performance on an entire DIMM.

 

9 full HD movies at 5GB each would require 45GB/s transfer speeds.

DDR5 at 5,600MT/s results in a 44.8GB/s transfer rate.

[Rym]

So wait, when will these be available for purchase?

[LAwLz]

5 minutes ago, Rym said:

So wait, when will these be available for purchase?

Intel has officially said that Tiger Lake supports LPDDR5 so we should see laptops with it in the not too distant future.

DDR5 on the other hand will most likely start showing up on the market in mid to late 2021. Intel's Alder Lake CPUs are expected to support DDR5 and they are scheduled for late 2021. Zen 4 is also expected to support DDR5 and those will launch sometime in 2022.

 

So my guess is that in about 12 months there should be some DDR5 on the market for consumers. But it will probably be quite expensive compared to DDR4. 

[Dedayog]

On 10/10/2020 at 7:19 PM, tim0901 said:

Intel and AMD aren't the only CPU manufacturers. For example IBM's POWER10 processor, due to be released 2H2021, has already been announced and will support DDR5 (and PCIe Gen 5).

How well does that mofo game tho!?

[DeScruff]

Heres to hoping we don't go through the same troubles with DDR5 that we did with DDR4 (The whole shortage thing, and how the price suddenly spiked up making RAM potentially more expensive then the CPU you put in a system)

[whm1974]

So how low is the Latency? I read a few years ago that DDR5 is ~8ns.

[porina]

1 hour ago, whm1974 said:

So how low is the Latency? I read a few years ago that DDR5 is ~8ns.

The official latency spec for DDR5 is about same as DDR4. But, as we see with DDR4, OC modules will go quite a bit lower, and we can assume DDR5 will likewise follow.

[Zodiark1593]

On 10/10/2020 at 3:56 PM, Gundar said:

Question

How does enterprise already have this? I'm pretty sure current epycs and xeons don't support it.

Given the spec had been around, it would come to no surprise if DDR5 memory controllers are already on-die, (albeit, not enabled for current parts) so as to allow in-house testing with minimal re-spins and reduce the time to market.