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Samsung announced this week that it's begun production of 8Gb DDR4-3200 fries using its new '10nm class' production lines. According to Samsung, these new chips aren't just a business-as-usual node compress — the visitor had to perform some significant additional design steps to bring the hardware to market.

Beginning, a bit of clarification: This isn't actually 10nm DRAM, though Samsung wouldn't mind if you idea it was. Samsung's PR helpfully states that "'10nm class' refers to 10nm-form denotes a procedure technology node somewhere between 10 and 19 nanometers, while 20nm-class ways a process engineering science node somewhere betwixt 20 and 29 nanometers."

The visitor goes on to notation that while its kickoff "20nm-course" DDR3 came to market in 2011, it didn't actually launch 20nm DDR3 until 2014. We wait something similar to be happening here. This kind of sleight-of-hand has become a flake of a Samsung trait; the visitor too likes to claim its EVO family of drives use "iii-bit MLC" NAND as opposed to TLC, probably considering the TLC moniker took a bit of a beating subsequently the 840 EVO had and then many long-term problems. Just that'due south a different topic.

10nm or non, Samsung claims that it had to prefer quadruple patterning lithography for its new DDR4, as well as develop a new proprietary jail cell design and new methods of ultra-thin dielectric layer deposition. The new DDR4 is expected to clock up to three.2GHz — we'll undoubtedly encounter third-party manufacturers ramping higher than that.

DDR4-4266 is technically already available on NewEgg, provided you're willing to pay $300 for 8GB of RAM. The performance benefits of that much retentivity frequency are questionable, to say the least, only nosotros typically meet a steady decrease in RAM price and an increment in memory frequencies over the life of any given RAM generation. DDR4 is nonetheless relatively young; it wouldn't be surprising to encounter DDR4-4266 selling for a fraction of what it costs today in a few more years.

Available in vanilla, chocolate, cherry, and SO-DIMM.

Available in vanilla, chocolate, ruby-red, and Then-DIMM.

The counter-statement to this, however, is the fact that Samsung is relying on quad patterning to manufacturer this DRAM. Quadruple patterning means that Samsung performs multiple boosted lithography steps to manufacture its DRAM. At that place are multiple means to perform multi-patterning and Samsung hasn't specified which it uses, but the important affair to know for our purposes is that multi-patterning significantly increases manufacturing costs. DRAM produced by this method may non hit the same price points every bit older retentivity did, or it may but accept longer to decrease in price.

Samsung intends to have what it's learned from this new '10nm-class' production and deploy it in mobile form factors subsequently this twelvemonth. JEDEC's LPDDR4 roadmap has a path to 4266 MHz already, and we may run into Samsung rolling out high frequencies in the near future. As screen resolutions have skyrocketed, mobile GPUs have often struggled to keep footstep, and adding faster RAM is the best way to improve performance in an otherwise-bottlenecked application.