Samsung Electronics announced the world’s first LPDDR5 DRAM chip earlier this week, having unveiled it in the form of an 8GB module that’s likely to be used by at least some members of the upcoming Galaxy S10 family, according to previous reports. The technology still isn’t being massed-manufactured, with Samsung and its partners so far only delivering a working, fully validated prototype after successfully completing functional testing. The LPDDR5 chips will eventually be produced at the company’s new factory line in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, with Samsung stating it will start manufacturing them depending on the demand from its customers.
With the Galaxy S10 being rumored to become the first smartphone lineup with LPDDR5 DRAM in the world, the Seoul-based technology juggernaut is likely to start mass-producing its new chips no later than the final quarter of 2018. The newly announced 10nm module is joining the firm’s growing series of high-end DRAM chips, featuring data transfer speeds of up to 6,400Mbps at a 1.1 operating voltage, thus outperforming Samsung’s LPDDR4X solutions that peak at 4,266Mbps by as much as 50-percent. Samsung is planning to offer the new chip in two bandwidth configurations – the aforementioned one and a slightly weaker setup delivering data speeds of up to 5,500Mbps at 1.05V.
Besides smartphones, Samsung’s LPDDR5 platform has also been designed for automotive applications, the company said, thus confirming last year’s expectations from industry watchers. OEMs will be able to balance the company’s new advancements so as to either deliver better computational capabilities, improve the energy efficiency of their devices, or do both to a degree. The modules can have up to 30-percent lower power consumption compared to LPDDR4X solutions, according to Samsung, though that figure likely only pertains to use cases that don’t offer significantly faster data transfer rates to those delivered by the previous generation of the firm’s hardware.