Samsung announces new ’10nm-magnificence’ DDR4

Samsung announced this week that it’s all started manufacturing of 8Gb DDR4-3200 chips the usage of its new ’10nm class’ manufacturing strains. consistent with Samsung, those new chips aren’t only a commercial enterprise-as-traditional node reduce — the organisation had to carry out a few massive additional layout steps to convey the hardware to marketplace.

First, a chunk of clarification: This isn’t surely 10nm DRAM, though Samsung wouldn’t mind if you thought it turned into. Samsung’s PR helpfully states that “’10nm magnificence’ refers to 10nm-elegance denotes a system generation node someplace among 10 and 19 nanometers, while 20nm-elegance manner a technique technology node someplace between 20 and 29 nanometers.”

The corporation goes on to observe that at the same time as its first “20nm-elegance” DDR3 got here to marketplace in 2011, it didn’t absolutely launch 20nm DDR3 till 2014. We anticipate something much like be going on right here. This sort of sleight-of-hand has become a bit of a Samsung trait; the organisation additionally likes to declare its EVO own family of drives use “three-bit MLC” NAND instead of TLC, probably due to the fact the TLC moniker took a chunk of a beating after the 840 EVO had such a lot of lengthy-term troubles. but that’s a exceptional topic.

10nm or not, Samsung claims that it had to undertake quadruple patterning lithography for its new DDR4, in addition to develop a brand new proprietary cellular layout and new strategies of ultra-thin dielectric layer deposition. the new DDR4 is anticipated to clock up to a few.2GHz — we’ll certainly see 0.33-birthday celebration producers ramping better than that.

DDR4-4266 is technically already to be had on NewEgg, furnished you’re inclined to pay $300 for 8GB of RAM. The overall performance benefits of that a whole lot reminiscence frequency are questionable, to say the least, however we normally see a steady lower in RAM charge and an growth in reminiscence frequencies over the existence of any given RAM era. DDR4 continues to be pretty young; it wouldn’t be sudden to see DDR4-4266 promoting for a fraction of what it charges these days in a few extra years.

The counter-argument to this, however, is the truth that Samsung is relying on quad patterning to producer this DRAM. Quadruple patterning method that Samsung performs multiple additional lithography steps to fabricate its DRAM. There are a couple of approaches to carry out multi-patterning and Samsung hasn’t distinct which it uses, however the crucial thing to realize for our functions is that multi-patterning considerably increases production expenses. DRAM produced by means of this method may not hit the same fee factors as older reminiscence did, or it could absolutely take longer to decrease in rate.

Samsung intends to take what it’s discovered from this new ’10nm-elegance’ product and deploy it in cell shape factors later this yr. JEDEC’s LPDDR4 roadmap has a direction to 4266 MHz already, and we can also see Samsung rolling out high frequencies within the close to destiny. As screen resolutions have skyrocketed, cell GPUs have frequently struggled to maintain tempo, and adding quicker RAM is the exceptional way to enhance overall performance in an in any other case-bottlenecked utility.