It's twice as fast as existing memory and has twice the capacity, paving the way for new use cases. Credit: Samsung Samsung Electronics last month announced the creation of a 512GB DDR5 memory module, its first since the JEDEC consortium developed and released the DDR5 standard in July of last year. The new modules are double the max capacity of existing DDR4 and offer up to 7,200Mbps in data transfer rate, double that of conventional DDR4. The memory will be able to handle high-bandwidth workloads in applications such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics, the company says. Samsung has also switched to High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology for the insulation layer, instead of the traditional silicon oxynitride. Intel adopted this for its Penryn generation of CPUs in 2008. It allows for transistor shrinkage while at the same reducing electrical current leakage, thus reducing heat. That translates to around 13% less power draw than older technologies, and in a dense data center, that can scale to considerable power reduction. If all goes as planned, DDR5 should come out around the same time as the next generation Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and AMD Epyc 7004 Genoa generations, along with some Arm servers like Ampere. We will also see the advent of other technologies, like PCI Express Gen5 and the CXL interconnect. The Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol is rapidly gaining popularity because it is a mesh, rather than a point-to-point protocol. It allows for memory to be pooled. It also allows processors to access each other’s memory, something PCIe cannot do. Samsung is currently sampling different variations of its DDR5 memory product family to customers for verification and, ultimately, certification with their products to accelerate AI/ML, exascale computing, analytics, networking, and other data-intensive workloads. Related content news Nvidia GTC 2024 wrap-up: Blackwell not the only big news More happened at the Nvidia GTC conference than the Blackwell announcement, including the launch of two new high-speed network platforms. By Andy Patrizio Mar 29, 2024 5 mins CPUs and Processors High-Performance Computing Data Center news Data center provider razes 55 homes to make room for Illinois campus Stream Data Centers bought 55 homes in a 34-acre subdivision and plans to break ground on a 2 million square-foot data center campus in late 2024. By Andy Patrizio Mar 21, 2024 4 mins High-Performance Computing Data Center news Nvidia debuts massive Blackwell-powered systems The DGX SuperPOD features eight or more DGX GB200 systems and can scale to tens of thousands of Nvidia Superchips. By Andy Patrizio Mar 18, 2024 3 mins CPUs and Processors High-Performance Computing Data Center news Nvidia launches Blackwell GPU architecture The next-gen Blackwell architecture will offer a 4x performance boost over the current Hopper lineup, Nvidia claims. By Andy Patrizio Mar 18, 2024 4 mins CPUs and Processors High-Performance Computing Data Center PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe