Samsung touts bonkers-fast 8 Gbit DRAM for phones, AIs

Samsung has shown off the first prototype of a somewhat-bonkers DRAM chip: at 8 Gbits, it's not news in terms of scale, but the LPDDR5 silicon pushes bits out the door at 6,400 megabits per second. Since it's a prototype, we can't say the memory is “coming to an iPhone near you”; rather, the company says, delivery will be “in …

[Sampler]

Overwriting cells with zeroes

| the chip avoids overwriting cells with zeroes

Coming soon, the security leak no one could see coming...

[tip pc]

Re: Overwriting cells with zeroes

Encrypt the contents of RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Overwriting cells with zeroes

not to worry, security software patch will cure that and slow it down....I've heard of clothes shops selling 2nds / rejects but hadn't realised chip makers are now following the same business idea.Find a product idea on their books that had previously been binned and resurrect as a feature.

[Richard 12]

Re: Overwriting cells with zeroes

I read that as being "If it's already zero, don't bother zero'ing it again"

Which makes sense. Charge leakage tends to drift a memory bit to zero so you want to "top it up" during refresh, but if it's already zero there's no need to switch the gate to empty it.

[happy but not clappy]

Maths?

So, 6.4Gb/s is the same as 51.2GB/s = 409.6 Gb/s ?

How does that work?

You have 64 in parallel maybe?

[Peter Boyle]

Re: Maths?

I assume 8 Chips, 8 bits per chip for a conventional 64 bit DDR channel.

64 bits x 6.4 bit/s x ( 1/8 bytes / bit ) = 51.2 GByte / s from a single 64 bit DDR memory

controller.

Of course, DRAM vendors should offer single chips with same address interface and wider

data path, instead of forcing us to buy multiple chips to make up full data width path.

Not in their interest to do so, but the minimum DIMM size in a world of 12/16 heading to 24 dimms in dual socket servers is annoying. You have to fully populate to get the bandwidth up, and often

that puts more cost & capacity in the memory than you would want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maths?

If this is for phone use I think 8 chips will be seen as 7 too many. All teardowns show the phone manufacturers prefer as few chips as possible. There is also the issue of putting 8 chips around the processor without routing conflicts or taking too much space. Of course flip chip packaging had helped but nothing is said about chip scale packaging even and the illustrations show huge beasts.

[jonathan keith]

His Dark Bill Of Materials

If my ailing Galaxy Note 4 is any indicator, those chips will cost far too much for Samsung to actually use them in their own phones.

(Edit: unless of course they're almost certain to fail after slightly more than two years.)

[Kevin McMurtrie]

I don't think I've ever had problems with the on-board storage being too slow. Most Android software is poorly written and is its own bottleneck. What's the planned use?

microSD cards are annoyingly slow but you can take my microSD slot when the onboard storage is the size of microSD cards 2 years in the future.

[Zippy's Sausage Factory]

Proof reading needed?

The company notes that the data rate means the LPDDR5 “can 51.2 gigabytes (GB) of data,

The data rate can what, exactly? I know "any noun can be verbed", but to "51.2 gigabytes" something seems to be stretching that phrase a little too far...

[jonathan keith]

Re: Proof reading needed?

This could be the first recorded incidence of a number being verbed, though. However, the question still remains: exactly *what* happens when you 51.2 a gigabyte?