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biffzinker
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DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Sun Aug 21, 2016 1:10 pm

Hardware experts believed the last DRAM would be the current DDR4, but that’s not the case, with DDR5 memory now under development.
Specifications for DDR5 memory will be released this year, and deployment of the DRAM will begin in 2020, according to a slide deck presented at the Intel Developer Forum this week.
DDR5 DRAM will have many benefits: Users will be able to cram more memory into PCs, and applications will run faster. DDR5 memory will be denser than earlier DRAM, and also consume less power, which could extend battery life in laptops.

PCs will need faster and denser memory for applications like virtual reality, and DDR5 will help, said Mike Howard, director of DRAM and memory at research firm IHS.
Right now, VR applications are in their early days, but the bandwidth provided by DDR4 may ultimately not be enough, Howard said.
Servers will be the first hardware to get DDR5 DRAM, and it could reach desktops and laptops 12 to 18 months later.

Hardware experts expected that DDR4 DRAM would ultimately be replaced by new memory technology like PCM (phase-change memory), RRAM (resistive RAM), or MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM), all of which can also store data when a computer is shut off. Those memory types are still in research or early stages of deployment, and could be expensive to make.

It was also expected that DDR4 would last longer because of the continued decline in PC shipments. But PCs are finding a new life in applications like VR, and the renewed interest is partly driving DDR5 DRAM development.

Source: PCWorld - DRAM will live on as DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Sun Aug 21, 2016 1:15 pm

On one hand I guess it's good to see continued development of new memory technologies, but on the other hand news like this also tends to mean that the commercial spread of the fancier stacked memory technologies isn't going to be very fast.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Sun Aug 21, 2016 11:04 pm

Looking forward to cheap consumer 32GB sticks. Second biggest is hopefully they will do something with the form factor. My 16GB sticks are mostly empty space.

PCI-E 4.0 (doubles bandwidth to around 2GB/s per link) would allow 8GB/s for an M.2 drive, or maybe MB would forgo that and have six two link(B-key) M.2 slots. The PCI-E 4.0 supposedly coming in Cannonlake seem more interesting tech change.

Sounds like DDR5 will just ratify DDR4-3000 and double max capacity plus some changes here and there as new baseline. It wont do anything like SATA AHCI to PCI-e NVMe. No change to bus and no change to form factor to keep up with times.
 
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 12:43 am

blahsaysblah wrote:
Looking forward to cheap consumer 32GB sticks. Second biggest is hopefully they will do something with the form factor. My 16GB sticks are mostly empty space.

Until more consumers have a need for 64GB I don't think 32GB sticks will go mainstream, since you want to use two (for dual-channel).

SO-DIMM form factor already exists for laptops. Don't some SFF motherboards use SO-DIMMs?
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 12:45 am

Thin-mITX boards have SO-DIMMs
 
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:23 am

I kinda surprised that ECC hasn't become a required part of the JEDEC spec. Memory capacities and densities are reaching the point that random uncorrected memory errors can happen on a daily basis with non-ECC stuff on a normal system at sea-level. The performance hit with ECC is non-trivial at this point.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:34 am

Krogoth wrote:
The performance hit with ECC is non-trivial at this point.

I assume you meant trivial heh...non-trivial would mean notable.
I want my next comp to use ECC but I doubt it will. :(
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:42 am

Krogoth wrote:
I kinda surprised that ECC hasn't become a required part of the JEDEC spec. Memory capacities and densities are reaching the point that random uncorrected memory errors can happen on a daily basis with non-ECC stuff on a normal system at sea-level.

While I'm a huge proponent of ECC, the "random error a day" claim is not true unless you've got a marginal DIMM, or corner-case software which is intentionally trying to cause memory errors (e.g. Rowhammer). The data set used for the Google study (on which you're presumably basing that claim) included repeat errors on problematic DIMMs which obviously had hardware issues.

Real error rates on non-broken hardware are roughly a couple of orders of magnitude lower.

Of course, ECC will also provide some protection from errors/crashes caused by failing DIMMs, which is a good thing, and is orthogonal to the issue of protection from random bit flips.

Krogoth wrote:
The performance hit with ECC is non-trivial at this point.

Err... I assume you meant trivial? Registered DIMMs do add quite a bit of latency, but unbuffered ECC is widely supported for systems that don't exceed 2 DIMMs per channel, and latency for unbuffered ECC should be comparable to standard non-ECC.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:44 am

LostCat wrote:
I want my next comp to use ECC but I doubt it will. :(

Most of my desktop and home server systems have used ECC since the early '00s. Affordable ECC support is one of the things which has kept me in the AMD camp in spite of the Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture's shortcomings.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 3:44 am

just brew it! wrote:
blahsaysblah wrote:
Looking forward to cheap consumer 32GB sticks. Second biggest is hopefully they will do something with the form factor. My 16GB sticks are mostly empty space.

Until more consumers have a need for 64GB I don't think 32GB sticks will go mainstream, since you want to use two (for dual-channel).

SO-DIMM form factor already exists for laptops. Don't some SFF motherboards use SO-DIMMs?

I've seen some mini-itx microserver boards that use SO-DIMMs.  I thought at first that was so they could cram 4 slots into a mini-itx board, but I've seen others since then using full size modules also having four slots.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:25 am

just brew it! wrote:
LostCat wrote:
I want my next comp to use ECC but I doubt it will. :(

Most of my desktop and home server systems have used ECC since the early '00s. Affordable ECC support is one of the things which has kept me in the AMD camp in spite of the Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture's shortcomings.

Well, my current comp doesn't support it afaik (A10-7850K) and I have no idea what Zen will do.  Or when I'll get my Zen build, at this point.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 6:22 am

LostCat wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
LostCat wrote:
I want my next comp to use ECC but I doubt it will. :(

Most of my desktop and home server systems have used ECC since the early '00s. Affordable ECC support is one of the things which has kept me in the AMD camp in spite of the Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture's shortcomings.

Well, my current comp doesn't support it afaik (A10-7850K) and I have no idea what Zen will do.  Or when I'll get my Zen build, at this point.

Yeah, the APUs don't support it. But aside from a few bottom-tier Semprons, everything else back to the original Athlon 64 has had ECC capability.

I don't know what the story will be with Zen.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 7:41 am

just brew it! wrote:
SO-DIMM form factor already exists for laptops. Don't some SFF motherboards use SO-DIMMs?

It'd still be nice to have smaller DIMMs in the next tech. Right now mobo makers have had to resort to putting M.2 slots between PCIe slots or on the back of the motherboard. I know that it's harder (and therefore more expensive) to put traces closer together, and there's still a need for plenty of pins. Still, smaller DIMMs means more board space for PCs of all sizes, not just SFF. 
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 10:45 am

derFunkenstein wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
SO-DIMM form factor already exists for laptops. Don't some SFF motherboards use SO-DIMMs?

It'd still be nice to have smaller DIMMs in the next tech. Right now mobo makers have had to resort to putting M.2 slots between PCIe slots or on the back of the motherboard. I know that it's harder (and therefore more expensive) to put traces closer together, and there's still a need for plenty of pins. Still, smaller DIMMs means more board space for PCs of all sizes, not just SFF. 


On the consumer side of things, there isn't a need for DIMM sizes to be as large as they are. The PCB size is set to allow more chips to be packed on to it for high capacity registered DIMMs targeted at servers.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Mon Aug 22, 2016 11:01 am

I see DDR5 not being that wide spread. By 2020, the market will have segmented into some very interesting areas.

Consumers will be utilizing SoC which I see adopting some form of stacked memory in their packaging. Think HBM, HMC or WideIO. Memory expandability is lost but by 2020 capacities up to 128 GB are expected in this area. That is more than enough for this segment.

Servers I see adopting some form of non-volatile memory standard. There are several options on the horizon. While these may not perform as well as DRAM for main memory, larger CPU caches and gains from persistent programming models (i.e. no storage model) will be a worthwhile trade off in the majority of cases. The server market can also absorb any additional cost in this area compared to the more hyper price sensitive consumer market.

That leaves the narrow window of the prosumer/workstation market for DDR5 to take hold. The more likely form factor I see for DDR5 here is that it'll adopt shared form factor as the non-volatile memory for servers (much like how DDR4 slots are going to be used for 3D Xpoint on Skylake-EP/EX). This will also make DDR5 the performance option for servers for legacy workloads.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 4:53 am

the wrote:
derFunkenstein wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
SO-DIMM form factor already exists for laptops. Don't some SFF motherboards use SO-DIMMs?

It'd still be nice to have smaller DIMMs in the next tech. Right now mobo makers have had to resort to putting M.2 slots between PCIe slots or on the back of the motherboard. I know that it's harder (and therefore more expensive) to put traces closer together, and there's still a need for plenty of pins. Still, smaller DIMMs means more board space for PCs of all sizes, not just SFF. 


On the consumer side of things, there isn't a need for DIMM sizes to be as large as they are. The PCB size is set to allow more chips to be packed on to it for high capacity registered DIMMs targeted at servers.


It actually because of electrical and tracing reasons. It easier to make DIMMs at JEDEC-spec if you have more pins for signaling. That's why SO-DIMM are slower then their DIMM counterparts and they require the use of high-density DRAM chips which drives up costs despite having less PCB and pins involved.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 6:26 am

Krogoth wrote:
It actually because of electrical and tracing reasons. It easier to make DIMMs at JEDEC-spec if you have more pins for signaling. That's why SO-DIMM are slower then their DIMM counterparts and they require the use of high-density DRAM chips which drives up costs despite having less PCB and pins involved.

You're just making random sh*t up. The address and data signaling pins are the same between DIMM and SODIMM form factor.

The extra pins on a full-size DIMM are used for additional power and ground (makes sense since they need to power more DRAM chips), ECC support (8 more data lines plus additional mask/strobe bits), and spare (there are more unconnected spare pins on a full size DIMM than there are on a SODIMM).

SODIMMs aren't slower because they can't make them faster; they're slower because there's minimal demand for faster ones. People generally don't overclock their laptops.

Edit: Actually, I was incorrect about the ECC. SODIMM does have pins for ECC.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:19 pm

Until there is even a draft JEDEC spec, I'll remain skeptical.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:31 pm

I have heard that non deterministic memory types (3D X-point) will be a reason to implement ECC and buffering in DDR5.

But who the hell thought that DDR4 was going to be the end of the road?
 
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:33 pm

Frugal wrote:
But who the hell thought that DDR4 was going to be the end of the road?

Unless a JEDEC spec materializes shortly, everyone still thinks that.
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:40 pm

Not by a long shot.

JEDEC is drafting, they just haven't told you about it.  Intel is assembling their wish list.  The other players are putting in their two cents.  It's just not ready yet.
 
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Re: DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:46 pm

Frugal wrote:
Not by a long shot.

JEDEC is drafting, they just haven't told you about it.


I would wager they aren't, based on prior experience and talking with industry. It took 10 years to draft the DDR4 spec, and last I checked (early this year) the process hadn't started yet for DDR5.

If they did start between now and then, it'd be a miracle to have the spec finished in less than half the time it took them last time. Unless it's just a small incremental change without much substance, of course.
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