Samsung is quite renowned for their mobile chip offerings, famously building the ARM chips inside Apple devices and pioneering their own ARM based system Exynos. Now, Samsung has announced, in an industry first, that they have created an eight gigabit (Gb), low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4), mobile DRAM chip.
The 20-nanometer(nm) manufacturing process will improve throughput of data over the existing 20nm LPDDR3 process offering a 50% performance increase to 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps) at 40% less energy at only 1.1 volts.
With all that out of the way, the end result is that this could mean mobile phones, tablets and more could see 4GB of RAM included in their spec sheets, significantly increasing their performance. The power savings of the new RAM modules could also be significant if paired with newer 28nm manufacturing process on the Snapdragon 805 SoC, or even with a new Exynos based processors that Samsung is rumoured to announce at CES next month.
It’s an exciting time in hardware manufacturing, but will this new technology translate into a smoother experience for mobile device users, that remains to be seen, if Android devices are optimised for use with the larger RAM ceiling, it could be quite significant, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Now all that is needed are ROM modules that give us access to 128Gb or 256Gb at the current price of 16Gb or 32Gb.
Could be waiting years for that to happen. Flash memory has hit a wall.