Samsung announces mass production plans for DDR5

Samsung has announced that it plans on putting DDR5 memory into mass production in 2021, but don't hold back on any upgrades just yet. 

Alongside an announcement that it has shipped a million modules of its EUV-based DDR4 RAM, known as D1x, Samsung has made claims about its future plans when it comes to DDR5. EUV-based manufacturing is a pivotal part of it, allowing for a more streamlined and faster production process, that also provides better yields. 

In the statement, Samsung explained that, 'EUV technology reduces repetitive steps in multi-patterning and improves patterning accuracy, enabling enhanced performance and greater yields as well as shortened development time.' In case you're wondering, EUV stands for 'extreme ultraviolet'. 

Samsung plans on building upon the D1x process with D1a, a 14nm-class process with EUV layers, that should provide an all-round superior experience. Thanks to being able to reduce usage of multi patterning, it should mean far better performance and yields. It makes sense given DDR5 is expected to double memory bandwidth, offer increased performance as well as capacity. For now though, Samsung hasn't provided insight into how many EUV layers its processes use.

It's complex stuff but exciting too. However, don't get too excited just yet. To be able to use DDR5 RAM next year and onwards, you'll need a compatible motherboard. For now, that support isn't there but there are plenty of rumours kicking around in terms of what it could involve. 

The current thinking is that AMD will provide support from 5th-gen Ryzen onwards. For Intel though? With Rocket Lake not launching until 2021 if recent leaks are anything to go by, and such processors not set to support DDR5, it's going to be a fair while indeed. Still, you may have a long wait but it's not like DDR4 will become obsolete any time soon even when DDR5 does arrive anyhow.

Expect to see DDR5 become part of server racks at some point first then maybe we'll see some powerful consumer systems embrace it. But, like we said, it won't be as soon as some power hungry folks may want it to be.