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We’ve been hearing rumours of DDR5 memory for years now, with very little coming to fruition since the seeds were planted way back when. However, recent developments within DDR5 technology have seen a slew of announcements made around the new memory modules.
One of the latest to emerge is from RAM giants Corsair – who have explicitly stated a DDR5-6400MHz RAM kit will be available at some stage this year – offering up 51GB/s of bandwidth (double that of DDR4). Furthermore, we should be able to expect 128 GB of RAM on a single memory module, meaning we may finally be able to run Chrome efficiently – but probably not.
A statement from a Corsair blog post read “The industry is hard at work on bringing the next generation of memory to a desktop near you and we’ve been in the memory game for a long time. We’re excited to share more about DDR5 in the coming months so keep an eye out for more details from our social channels!” with a DDR5 primer to keep people up to date with what’s going on.
Corsair has been at the forefront of memory developments over the last decade, so it’s absolutely no surprise to see these latest announcements unfold. What Corsair didn’t mention, however, was which memory kits would launch under the next generation. As always, we can probably expect some form of Dominator line and a more base-level alternative – with more news on these two factors coming in the next couple of months.
| Feature | DDR4 | DDR5 | DDR5 Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data rates | 3200Mhz | 4800-6400mhz | Increased performance and bandwidth |
| VDD/VDDQ/VPP | 1.2 | 1.1 | Lower power |
| Device densities | 16GB Max | 64GB | Larger monolithic devices |
| Prefetch | 8n | 16n | Keeps the internal core clock low |
| CRC | Write | Read/Write | Strengthens system RAS by protecting read data |
| Burst length | BL8 | BL16, BL32 | Allows 64B cache line fetch w/only 1 DIMM subchannel. |
Despite Corsair’s 6400MHz RAM leaving most DDR4 modules behind, there are rumours of modules offering almost double that to come. A RAM manufacturer has recently stated that 10,000MHz is currently in the research phase – we won’t hold our breath for the arrival of that anytime soon though.
As we state in our ‘Everything you need to know about DDR5‘ page, DDR5 memory is set to bring over twice the performance increase when compared to DDR4 alternatives. We’ve previously seen DDR4 hitting speeds of over 7GHz, so it isn’t that much of a push imagining DDR5 hitting over 10GHz. That said, the wait is almost over, and DDR5 will soon start replacing its predecessor.
