It’s been over 3 years since the computing industry stated that the DDR5 would be released; SK hynix announced the world’s first 16 Gigabit DDR5 DRAM in November 2018. With the tantalising promise to reduce power consumption and doubling memory speed, the long awaited DDR5 release date is set to make an appearance in Q3 2021 at the earliest. This is according to SK hynix press release from 6th October.
DDR5 Versus DDR4
The DDR5, or to give it its proper name – Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory, is the follow up to the DDR4 and will undoubtedly shake things up, eventually. The development standards and requirements were released on July 14th 2020 by JEDEC Solid State Technology Association and According to SK hynix latest statement we’re looking at..
“DDR5 supports transfer rate of 4,800 – 5,600Mbps, which is 1.8 times faster than the DDR4. It can transmit 9 full-HD (FHD) movies (5GB each) per second with 5,600Mbps transfer rate”
The DDR5 is also looking to increase reliability by up to 20 times more, with a potential capacity going up to 256Gb. This means that, according to Omdia (marketing intelligence provider) the DDR5 is likely to hold around 10% market share by 2022, rising to 43% by 2024.
SK hynix have been working in partnership with Intel, which suggests that there will already be a level of compatibility when the DDR5 is finally released but there’s no word yet regarding AMD. Full Specs below..
| DDR5 | DDR4 | DDR3 | DDR2 | DDR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data Transfer Rate (Mbps) | 3200-6400 | 1600-3200 | 800-1600 | 400 – 800 | 200 – 400 |
| Operating Voltage (V) | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.5 / 1.35 | 1.8 | 2.5 |
| Capacity | 8Gb – 32Gb | 4Gb – 16Gb | 512Mb – 2Gb | 128Mb – 2Gb | 64Mb – 1Gb |
| Release Year | 2020 | 2013 | 2008 | 2004 | 2001 |
