Samsung announced a major breakthrough in DDR5 SDRAM design by producing 512 GB DDR5 DIMMs. Not only was this the highest capacity RAM stick in the world, but Samsung also took first place in speed.

This was made possible thanks to Samsung's TSV technology (confusingly short for Through Silicon Via), which allows eight memory chips to be stacked. It also uses HKMG (High-K Metal Gate) material, which has traditionally been limited to logic semiconductors, not memory. This is because as densities have increased, conventional insulating layers have become too thin, leading to increased leakage currents.

HKMG was first used by Samsung in 2018 in GDDR6 memory, proving that GPUs really do rely on the cutting edge of technology development.

The new memory also consumes about 13% less power, an important savings when used in data centers.

Gaming machines will not need 512GB memory modules, and in fact, most desktop processors have much smaller capacity limits than that (64GB or 128GB depending on the CPU).

Rather, these modules are designed for serious high-bandwidth workloads and will be used in medical research, financial markets, autonomous driving, etc. Samsung names Intel and its Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processor in this new memory press release. [DDR5 offers twice the bandwidth and lower power consumption of DDR4, but there are no consumer platforms that support it yet; DDR5 was officially released in July 2020, almost two years late, but DDR4 has enough bandwidth for most consumer operations, so support is rapidly increasing. However, DDR4 has sufficient bandwidth for most consumer operations, so there was no rush to support it.

The first consumer platform to support DDR5 is expected to be Intel's Alder Lake, scheduled for release in early 2022; AMD's Zen 4 architecture will also support DDR5, just after Alder Lake, It is expected to be released in the summer of 2022. With Samsung pushing hard for development, expect a wide range of speed and capacity options by the time DDR5 is available in gaming PCs.