AMD to Support DDR5, LPDDR5, and PCI-Express gen 5.0 by 2022, Intel First to Market with DDR5

[btarunr]

AMD is expected to support the next-generation DDR5 memory standard by 2022, according to a MyDrivers report citing industry sources. We are close to a change in memory standards, with the 5-year old DDR4 memory standard beginning a gradual phase out over the next 3 years. Leading DRAM manufacturers such as SK Hynix have already hinted mass-production of the next-generation DDR5 memory to commence within 2020. Much like with DDR4, Intel could be the first to market with processors that support it, likely with its "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon processors. AMD, on the other hand, could debut support for the standard only with its "Zen 4" microarchitecture slated for 2021 technology announcements, with 2022 availability.

AMD "Zen 4" will see a transition to a new silicon fabrication process, likely TSMC 5 nm-class. It will be an inflection point for the company from an I/O standpoint, as it sees the introduction of DDR5 memory support across enterprise and desktop platforms, LPDDR5 on the mobile platform, and PCI-Express gen 5.0 across the board. Besides a generational bandwidth doubling, PCIe gen 5.0 is expected to introduce several industry-standard features that help with hyper-scalability in the enterprise segment, benefiting compute clusters with multiple scalar processors, such as AMD's CDNA2. Intel introduced many of these features with its proprietary CXL interconnect. AMD's upcoming "Zen 3" microarchitecture, scheduled for within 2020 with market presence in 2021, is expected to stick with DDR4, LPDDR4x, and PCI-Express gen 4.0 standards. DDR5 will enable data-rates ranging between 3200 to 8400 MHz, densities such as single-rank 32 GB UDIMMs, and a few new physical-layer features such as same-bank refresh.



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[Makaveli]

With all these new technologies coming out around the same time these platforms should be expensive on release.

 

[xrror]

DDR5 will enable data-rates ranging between 3200 to 8400 MHz

Always get a laugh when on a new DDR standard they give a range that includes speeds that are already commonly available.

At least it's 3200 and not say 2400. But gonna be a hard sell for those early sticks of DDR5 3200 @ CAS 50

 

[beautyless]

DDR4 start speed is as low as DDR3 too (1600MHz).
But most people will buy them from 2133mhz speed and above.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Meanwhile I am still on DDR2 and DDD3 with my machines

 

[Nordic]

Wooh! I just upgraded in DDR4 in 2020. I shall now sit on DDR4 until maybe DDR6 comes out I guess maybe.

 

[xrror]

heh DDR2-400 (PC2-3200) existed too in the very early DDR2 PCIe gen1 days. To put that in context that's a base clock of 100. It was horrible.
But that's The Joke - all of the DDR generations suck at launch and only really take off once they can clear above where the prior gen couldn't handle (or at least not easily).

DDR5's age will come when 32gig sticks running at say 6400 are the "just the normal base stick" much how right now DDR4 16gig sticks running at 3600 are quickly becoming the "base normal"

DDR3 it seemed to be around 1600 with 8gig sticks

DDR2 was 4gig sticks at 800

DDR1 was 1gig sticks at 200 (400)

SDR i can't remember. 256mb at 133?

EDO was expensive until toward the end. SIMMs not DIMMs ;p

I'm probably off on many of those, it's been a few years ago!

 

[Mussels]

heh DDR2-400 (PC2-3200) existed too in the very early DDR2 PCIe gen1 days. To put that in context that's a base clock of 100. It was horrible.
But that's The Joke - all of the DDR generations suck at launch and only really take off once they can clear above where the prior gen couldn't handle (or at least not easily).

DDR5's age will come when 32gig sticks running at say 6400 are the "just the normal base stick" much how right now DDR4 16gig sticks running at 3600 are quickly becoming the "base normal"

DDR3 it seemed to be around 1600 with 8gig sticks

DDR2 was 4gig sticks at 800

DDR1 was 1gig sticks at 200 (400)

SDR i can't remember. 256mb at 133?

EDO was expensive until toward the end. SIMMs not DIMMs ;p

I'm probably off on many of those, it's been a few years ago!

Hell i had DDR1 600Mhz, and it crapped all over early DDR2

OCZ High Grade Memory - PC4800 DDR and PC5400 DDR-2

Today we're checking out some OCZ memory modules - PC4800 "EL Platinum Limited Edition" DDR and PC5400 "EL Gold" DDR-2.

www.tweaktown.com

Every gen does this, with the lowest part of the standard being pretty average to make bulk production cheap so the standard can be adopted quickly, and as yields improve they ramp up the speeds in bulk made OEM products (so say, dell can release the same thing with 100Mhz faster ram and CPU every 6 months)

 

[ChosenName]

Remember SIPP packaged RAM? I remember - vividly - as the 4x 256kB SIPPs I bought only lasted one motherboard before SIMMs were victorious.

 

[R0H1T]

No not really, which decade century was this

 

[goodeedidid]

Isný pci-e gen 3 like 10 years old or something? How come so fast with gen 5?

 

[Mussels]

Isný pci-e gen 3 like 10 years old or something? How come so fast with gen 5?

Lets just blame intel for being stagnant - we'd still be on quad cores and PCI-E 3 without ryzen shaking things up

 

[ARF]

Isný pci-e gen 3 like 10 years old or something? How come so fast with gen 5?

It's always like this - "we are not going to give you anything better, we are not going to give you anything better, we are not going to give you anything better" they had kept repeating for ages, and then suddenly when AMD decided to up the game with PCIe 4, Intel went aw wa, we are so great, let's introduce useless PCIe 5 to show how great we are...

 

[delshay]

Hell i had DDR1 600Mhz, and it crapped all over early DDR2

OCZ High Grade Memory - PC4800 DDR and PC5400 DDR-2

Today we're checking out some OCZ memory modules - PC4800 "EL Platinum Limited Edition" DDR and PC5400 "EL Gold" DDR-2.

www.tweaktown.com

AFAIK DDR1 at those speed was very hard to get hold of. It must be worth a bit now as it's even more rare.

 

[Mussels]

AFAIK DDR1 at those speed was very hard to get hold of. It must be worth a bit now as it's even more rare.

I got it free as a review sample back for a now-gone website... the owner just vanished one day and without him paying the bills, several years of mediocre reviews (i was a teenager) vanished overnight

 

[Punkenjoy]

Well i think in this one we might have to wait and see a little bit. In the past, the main trick was to increase the transfert rate while going back to an internal lower clock speed for the memory. DDR5 might bring some improvement that might lead to better performance.

- Switch from 1 channel per stick (64 bit + 8 bit ECC) to 2x(32 bit + 8 bit ECC). With this change, they also upgrade the burst lenght from 8 to 16 (to make sure a core can fill a line of cache with 1 burst). This is significant in our modern multicore/multithread environment as the number of channel per core have just lowered over time. The memory timming is only one part of the equation. The memory controller currently have to work with a lot of thread trying to get data from memory and they will probably just end up queued. Having the possibility to double the memory request a cpu can do at the same time will probably results in a speed increase in heavy multithreaded workload. That might not reflect on Single threaded latency test.

I am not sure how this will improve gaming performance as to benefits from this, you have to hope that each thread access data that is on a different channels, witch might not be always the case.

- Internal change to memory banks and bank groups (higher number of bank group per dimm with the same number of bank in it)
- Same Bank Refresh instead whole dimm refresh meaning that globally each memory DIMM will have an higher availability and this will reduce also the global latency. The memory can't be accessed for read or write while it's being refreshed.

So DDR5 do not only mean that they are going to double the memory transfert speed while cutting in half again the memory clock speed like they did with every version.(and this is why you get higher lattency every times) but it actually try to change the way the memory work to make it more efficient.

So with this, i am not sure how a DDR4 3200 kit will work against a DDR5 3200 kit. There might be scenario where the DDR5 outperform the DDR4 just by the way it's being designed. But that do not means anything until we really know what would be the commonly available spec.

The last thing that will help, but might take more time to benefits from it is DDR5 will allow larger DIMM size meaning we will be able to get much more memory per system.

So for me, it's really wait and see.

 

[Cranky5150]

Remember SIPP packaged RAM? I remember - vividly - as the 4x 256kB SIPPs I bought only lasted one motherboard before SIMMs were victorious.

LOL! Yeah i actually do remember those before SIMM's. I had a good friend building machines back then. (386 and 486) We went from needing 4 sticks to only 2 with SIMMS. AHH memories..

 

[Valantar]

This begs the question: will AM4 stay with us until 2022, or will AMD launch a DDR5-ready socket for Zen 3 with early boards only supporting DDR4? The latter would absolutely be possible, though I don't think I've ever seen that happen with the first generation of products not supporting the new memory at all - DDR2 and DDR3 boards for platforms supporting both launched simultaneously after all, as did DDR3 boards for platforms with DDR4 support. Guess they could launch an AM5 first with PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 and then AM5+ with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support and full backwards compatibility for any newer CPUs? Forward compatibility would require a DDR5 controller, so that won't happen.

 

[cyberloner]

Meanwhile I am still on DDR2 and DDD3 with my machines

same here... so hard to update the hardware now ... $$$

 

[olymind1]

Wooh! I just upgraded in DDR4 in 2020. I shall now sit on DDR4 until maybe DDR6 comes out I guess maybe.

i upgraded to DDR4 just last year too, and they will remain in my config for at least 3-4 years.

 

[Tomorrow]

This begs the question: will AM4 stay with us until 2022, or will AMD launch a DDR5-ready socket for Zen 3 with early boards only supporting DDR4? The latter would absolutely be possible, though I don't think I've ever seen that happen with the first generation of products not supporting the new memory at all - DDR2 and DDR3 boards for platforms supporting both launched simultaneously after all, as did DDR3 boards for platforms with DDR4 support. Guess they could launch an AM5 first with PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 and then AM5+ with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support and full backwards compatibility for any newer CPUs? Forward compatibility would require a DDR5 controller, so that won't happen.

No need to guess. The data we have points to Zen3 being a 2020 release on AM4. Zen4 will move to AM5, DDR5 and possibly PCIe 5.0 but not in 2021 but in 2022. It has taken roughly a year for new Zen generations to come out and since Zen3 will come out at the end of the year that means it would be very difficult to cram Zen4 into 2021. Not sure what AMD will release in 2021 then. Im guessing Cžesanne or whatever it's called in both mobile and desktop.

 

[Valantar]

i upgraded to DDR4 just last year too, and they will remain in my config for at least 3-4 years.

Guess I was early adopting DDR4 in 2017, but in my defense I came from a DDR2 C2Q system

DDR5 will mainly be interesting to me in terms of APU systems, general system performance doesn't benefit much from faster RAM,but iGPUs sure do. A 5nm APU with 15-20 RDNA 2 CUs and DDR5-6000? I would definitely like that, yes. Same goes for LPDDR5 in laptops, though at least we have LPDDR4X there to make up some of the deficit compared to dedicated VRAM.

No need to guess. The data we have points to Zen3 being a 2020 release on AM4. Zen4 will move to AM5, DDR5 and possibly PCIe 5.0 but not in 2021 but in 2022. It has taken roughly a year for new Zen generations to come out and since Zen3 will come out at the end of the year that means it would be very difficult to cram Zen4 into 2021. Not sure what AMD will release in 2021 then. Im guessing Cžesanne or whatever it's called in both mobile and desktop.

You might be right there, though a full calendar year without a CPU release will look weird even if the timing isn't actually any slower than previous generations. Still, the time of expecting major performance improvements year over year is past, so I suppose this is reasonable. At least that way I won't be feeling as bad for building a Renoir HTPC once they hit the desktop later this year

 

[candle_86]

Always get a laugh when on a new DDR standard they give a range that includes speeds that are already commonly available.

At least it's 3200 and not say 2400. But gonna be a hard sell for those early sticks of DDR5 3200 @ CAS 50

It's what happens

Ddr2 started at 3200, ddr3 at 800, ddr4 at 1600.

Now if trends continue ddr5 won't be faster than 4 for at least a year.

 

[Valantar]

It's what happens

Ddr2 started at 3200, ddr3 at 800, ddr4 at 1600.

Now if trends continue ddr5 won't be faster than 4 for at least a year.

Given that manufacturers have been showing off DDR5->5000 a year or two before commercialization I'm not worried. And yes, DDR4 started at 1600, but the first commercially widespread standard was 2133 which aligned with the fastest widely available DDR3 (there were faster DIMMs available, but they were expensive and rare). Similarly, DDR4-5000 exists, but even 16GB of it costs more than the average ultra high end PC. DDR4-3600 can reasonably be called the fastest widely available and affordable DDR4, similar to DDR3-1866. If cheap no-name DDR5 starts out at 3600 JEDEC specs, that is perfectly fine, because it means that better binned and faster and/or lower latency DIMMs will arrive in short order. But as I said, given what manufacturers have been showing off for a while now I would be surprised if we didn't see DDR5-4000-4500 available from day one.

 

[candle_86]

Given that manufacturers have been showing off DDR5->5000 a year or two before commercialization I'm not worried. And yes, DDR4 started at 1600, but the first commercially widespread standard was 2133 which aligned with the fastest widely available DDR3 (there were faster DIMMs available, but they were expensive and rare). Similarly, DDR4-5000 exists, but even 16GB of it costs more than the average ultra high end PC. DDR4-3600 can reasonably be called the fastest widely available and affordable DDR4, similar to DDR3-1866. If cheap no-name DDR5 starts out at 3600 JEDEC specs, that is perfectly fine, because it means that better binned and faster and/or lower latency DIMMs will arrive in short order. But as I said, given what manufacturers have been showing off for a while now I would be surprised if we didn't see DDR5-4000-4500 available from day one.

Even ddr4 2133 was slower than ddr3 1866 thanks to timings, speed isn't the only indicator. Remember you needed ddr2 667 to see a 1-3% gain over ddr400 and you needed ddr3 1333 to see the same small gain over ddr2. Like wise ddr4 2400 is just barely quicker than ddr3 1866 again timings.