We may be getting a little carried away. At this point, it seems like Chrome is always destined to eat memory when working with lots of tabs (womp womp). That said, I can't help but dream of the day when such a large amount of memory won't seem so huge, and it will be similar to the 16GB or 32GB debate we're having today.
I admit that is a long way off. But DDR5 is not, and the era of next-generation RAM will begin in earnest when Intel announces Alder Lake later this year, followed perhaps not too long after by AMD's Zen 4 platform.
As far as that goes, Corsair has joined the chorus of memory manufacturers who have begun talking about DDR5, stating that next-generation RAM will arrive "soon."
"The industry is working hard to bring next generation memory to desktops near you, and we have been in the memory game for a long time," Corsair said in a blog post, "We look forward to sharing more about DDR5 in the coming months.
Meanwhile, Corsair has put together a DDR5 primer (PDF) that explains what to expect from the next generation RAM standard. The biggest takeaway is the increase in bandwidth. Burst length, or how many bits of data can be read per cycle, has doubled to 16 bits in DDR5. This corresponds to 32 bits per channel and a total of 64 full cache lines per module for double data rate (DDR) memory
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In more recognizable terms, the official JEDEC specification for DDR4 is 3,200 MT/s, while the DDR5 standard is 4,800 MT/s. Corsair notes that high clock kits are inevitable, as seen with DDR4. We don't yet know exactly how high the clock will be, but at least one memory manufacturer is already talking about DDR5-10000 RAM; a DDR5-10000 1TB kit, please!
We don't expect to see such a speed increase at launch. However, Corsair has indicated that DDR5-6400 kits will be available initially; DDR5-6400 kits will offer 51GB/s of bandwidth, while DDR4-3200 kits will promote 26GB/s.
"Higher bandwidth will allow systems with CPUs with more cores to use the memory bus more efficiently, and denser capacity will allow the system to tackle more at once, making it ideal for streaming and content creation (just a few applications just to name a few)," said Corsair.
Corsair also hopes to put latency concerns to rest: DDR5 kits have higher CAS latency than DDR4, but according to Corsair, this is offset by the DDR5 design, particularly by splitting the module into two separate channels to shorten traces This is offset. [Individual modules are split into two separate channels by design, contributing to shorter traces for less latency and higher speeds when communicating with individual memory ICs on the memory module. Also, while DDR4 required command/address signals to pass through all banks of memory in a long chain, signals from the CPU must travel an overall shorter path to access a specific bank of memory, so what is called command/address mirroring becomes possible," explains Corsair.
DDR4 allows whenever one memory bank needs to be refreshed, the CPU sits there and waits for all memory banks to be refreshed before reading or writing from RAM. So even though the CAS latency of the DDR5 kit is higher than DDR4, the overall latency of the high performance kit will be comparable.
So much to look forward to, let's hope they don't develop a cryptocurrency that mines on RAM like they do on GPUs and storage.
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