Samsung has just announced that it began mass-producing its new 12GB LPDDR5 mobile DRAM. This new module is aimed towards high-end smartphones, and some news sources already started guessing that it will be included on the Galaxy Note10 series, but that probably won’t be the case.
One would think that the timing is perfect for something like this, but the Snapdragon 855 doesn’t support LPDDR5 RAM, neither does the Snapdragon 855 Plus, based on its official spec sheet. A variant of the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ that will launch in the US and China will be fueled by one of those two chips, probably the Snapdragon 855, so it’s hard to believe that Samsung would utilize LPDDR5 RAM in a variant of the phone for Europe and India, and not do the same for the US and China.
Truth be said, we don’t even know if the Exynos 9825 supports LPDDR5 RAM. That chip hasn’t been officially announced yet by the company, even though a recent benchmark revealed that it will fuel the Galaxy Note10 series of devices.
Even if the Exynos 9825 ends up supporting LPDDR5, which is possible, Samsung probably won’t aim to differentiate the Snapdragon and Exynos variants of the Galaxy Note10 that much. The company 12GB LPDDR5 RAM will probably make its debut with the Galaxy S11 series next year, that’s at least our guess in all this.
Now, regarding this new RAM module. The company says that it has been optimized for enabling 5G and AI features in future smartphones. This new RAM has arrived only five months after announcing mass production of the 12GB LPDDR4X RAM, sooner than expected, that’s for sure.
Samsung says that the 12GB LPDDR5 RAM is approximately 1.3 times faster than LPDDR4X, as it can transfer data at a rate of 5,500MB/s, while LPDDR4X can do the same at a data rate of 4,266MB/s.
The company says that the LPDDR5 RAM can transfer 44GB of data, or about 12 fullHD (3.7GB-sized) movies, in only a second. This new LPDDR5 module uses up to 30-percent less power than its predecessor. To make things even more exciting for mobile customers, Samsung expects to develop a 16GB LPDDR5 RAM module next year.
The company has also released a timeline of its DRAM releases, just to give us all an outlook of what has been. The very first 256 MDDR, 50nm-class RAM was released way back in 2009, and it was able to transfer data at a rate of 400MB/s. Next couple of modules, 512MB and 1/2GB ones arrived in 2010 and 2011. Those two were 40nm and 30nm ones, and were followed by a number of 20nm and 10nm modules. If you’d like to check out the full list of RAM modules that the company released since 2009, take a look at the image provided down below.