Intel and Micron may be prepping us for a world where computers use the same type of hardware for both memory and storage, but we aren’t there just yet. So get ready for DDR5 memory.
The organization responsible for setting memory standards says the DDR5 will offer twice the bandwidth and twice the density of DDR4 RAM, which should lead to improved performance.
DDR5 should also be more energy efficient than current memory.
The Joint Electron Device Engineering Council says the DDR5 standard should be finalized in 2018, although that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to buy the memory next year. It could take a little longer for DIMMs to actually hit the streets, since hardware makers will also need to update motherboards to work with DDR5 memory.
As Ars Technica points out, the DDR4 spec was finalized in 2012, but DDR4 memory wasn’t widely available until 3 years later.
DDR5 will probably be released for desktop PCs first, but eventually the new platform could bring faster memory to laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
via PC World
It doesn’t look like CPUs are getting any faster, so all that’s left is for RAM and storage to catch up. If everything was as fast as the CPU, we’d see really good boot times… But at this point its more important to shrink computers and reduce power consumption. At least on the consumer end…
Yes, memory needs to catch up, but also busses (and/or memory controllers) (and I mean inter-core, not just PCIe).
And we need new techniques for branch prediction, or some way to mitigate the effects of pipeline stalls and flushes.
And better instructions to enable mass parallelisation (transactions, low overhead fences etc).
Anyway – that’s all very tough to do.
Possibly the last of its kind…