Samsung Announces LPDDR5X Memory

Samsung Announces LPDDR5X-8500 Memory

Samsung on Tuesday said that it had approved its LPDDR5X memory at operating speeds of 8.5 Gbps.New DRAM to be used for bandwidth hungry applications beyond smartphones and tablets, including PCs, high-performance computing applications, servers, and vehicles.

LPDDR memory was developed primarily with smartphones in mind, it's now widely used in Apple's desktops and notebooks as well as laptops powered by system-on-chips by AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. Apple tends to use LPDDR4X/LPDDR5 memory with wide interfaces to maximize memory bandwidth without the need for expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

Samsung's LPDDR5X-8500, but we can expect these memory ICs to be used for devices beyond handsets.

Intel has not yet validated its processors with LPDDR5X memory in general. Formally, Intel's latest 12th Generation Core 'Alder Lake' CPUs for notebooks support LPDDR5-5200 memory, not LPDDR5X DRAM, and certainly not 8500 Gbps data transfer rates. Perhaps Intel's 13th Gen Core 'Raptor Lake' SoCs for laptops will support both LPDDR5X and ultra-high data transfer rates, but we'll have to wait and see.

"The joint validation of 8.5 Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM has enabled us to accelerate market-wide availability of this high-speed memory interface by more than a year, which is a tremendous accomplishment made possible through our long-standing collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies," said Daniel Lee, Executive Vice President of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics.