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DDR5 Question

It might be a little early for this question but I had a question about DDR5. I was doing a little research about it I found that each DIMM has two channels. So what we currently understand as dual channel is now accomplished using 1 DIMM? Does that possibly mean future builds using DDR5 would be built with only 1 DIMM? Quad channel would be accomplished using a dual DIMM module kit, similar to what we use now to get dual channel? When building a system I've always used two DIMMs so I get dual channel, I assume most people do the same to get the most performance. Would quad channel take dual channels place as the default design when building a new computer?

 

This all sounds very cool, but looks like there is a lot to learn about this new memory and maybe some questions won't be answered until we can get our hands on it.

 

DIMM-DDR5.png

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11 minutes ago, Noxz86 said:

It might be a little early for this question but I had a question about DDR5. I was doing a little research about it I found that each DIMM has two channels. So what we currently understand as dual channel is now accomplished using 1 DIMM? Does that possibly mean future builds using DDR5 would be built with only 1 DIMM? Quad channel would be accomplished using a dual DIMM module kit, similar to what we use now to get dual channel? When building a system I've always used two DIMMs so I get dual channel, I assume most people do the same to get the most performance. Would quad channel take dual channels place as the default design when building a new computer?

 

This all sounds very cool, but looks like there is a lot to learn about this new memory and maybe some questions won't be answered until we can get our hands on it.

Depends entirely on how the CPU manufacturers choose to implement the memory controllers. It's too early to speculate.

Main: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, 16 GB 4400 MHz DDR4 Fedora 38 x86_64

Secondary: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4, Fedora 38 x86_64

Server: AMD Athlon PRO 3125GE, 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 ECC, TrueNAS Core 13.0-U5.1

Home Laptop: Intel Core i5-L16G7, 8 GB 4267 MHz LPDDR4x, Windows 11 Home 22H2 x86_64

Work Laptop: Intel Core i7-10510U, NVIDIA Quadro P520, 8 GB 2667 MHz DDR4, Windows 10 Pro 22H2 x86_64

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Each "channel" on a DDR5 DIMM is 32 bits wide. A DDR4 DIMM is 64 bits wide. So they are effectively the same in that regard, even if the underlying technical details differ.

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Yes, there's 2 channels, but it's not quite the equivalent of old dual channel

DDR4 is 64 bit wide, dual channel means opportunity to read/write 2 x 64 bit.

 

The new DDR5 is 40bit per channel (you can easily see from the picture , 5 chips x 8 bit = 40 bits) and i don't know if a part of these bits is ECC information or not (didn't do my research, and I heard the DDR5 has some built in error correction by default, so not sure how it works)

 

I suspect one one of the reasons why they did it like this is because  bigger capacities per chip and to save power by disabling one channel when needed.

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