SK Hynix Slips In The DDR5 First

Lower Power And Faster Data Rates

If you had bet on Micron or Samsung being first to market with DDR5 you might be a little disappointed to hear that it is SK Hynix that is announcing the first commercially available DDR5 modules today.  The DIMMs will have reduced power requirements, down to 1.1V from 1.2V which won’t have a big effect on your next build but will certainly be noticeable in large data centres.   What you will notice is the performance, which will be between 4,800 and 5,600 megatransfers per second, or if you prefer DDR5-4800 through DDR5-5600, which will be a nice boost for a future system.

You will have to be somewhat patient as Intel will not be supporting DDR5 until Alder Lake which, if everything goes well, will be available very late next year while AMD’s compatible Zen architecture won’t arrive until some time in 2022.  In the mean time you can learn a new phrase; the 1Ynm manufacturing process.  According to what The Register was told this refers to any process node between 14nm to 16nm, regardless of how many +’s appear one assumes.

While Jong-Hoon Oh, Sk Hynix’s executive VP and CMO offered some insights into the new chips, we didn’t hear anything about pricing … yet.