2017 and 2018 have been and are years of many component-level changes, a part that is not always seen in the final smartphone, but that has a great importance in the day-to-day devices, for reasons for performance and efficiency. In this sense, after the chips with the neural processing units and the new UFS 3.0 storage standard, it is the LPDDR5 DRAM memory tower.

Samsung has completed the development of LPDDR5 8 gigabit (Gb) chips with its most widespread production process to date, 10 nanometers, after starting production of 16 Gb of GDDR6 in December 2017 and finalized the development of the 16 Gb DDR5 in February of this year. For LPDDR5, Samsung has made significant changes in the architecture, such as doubling the number of memory banks for each DRAM cell, from 8 to 16, and all with lower power consumption, which will be more than half of LPDDR4X at rest, with a reduction of 30% on average.

In addition to efficiency, the key to this generation will, of course, be speed. According to Samsung, LPDDR5 will reach speeds of 6,400 megabits per second which makes it exceed 1.5 times the speed of memory LPDDR4, which in the most modern terminals has reached 4,266 megabits per second. According to Samsung, the new standard can send 51.2 GB of data per second, or 14 full-HD movies of 3.7 GB per second. This first LPDDR5 memory with 6400 megabits per second will have a voltage of 1.1 V. The capacity we will see in smartphones will be 8 GB .

There will be another version of DRAM LPDDR5 that will reach a maximum of 5,500 megabits per second with a voltage reduced to 1.05 V. Builders will be able to choose which of the two to implement based on their needs and their performance. Today, Samsung is promoting DRAM LPDDR5 as a way to improve machine learning solutions and the nascent 5G, which is expected to arrive this second half of the year.