DDR5 Could Reach The Consumer Market As Early As 2019

[Pemalite]

Turkish said:

Whats your dream scenario? :P I think they'll surprise us with the amount of ram, kinda like the PS4 announcement. When it is announced early 2020 16-24GB gpu cards should be commonplace.

Also, DDR5 is too soon, I just got 16GB of DDR4 last year! Only 2400, wish I got higher but it was when people still mistakenly said higher frequency didn't matter.

DDR5 is not too soon.

DDR3 was on the market for a long ass time... And we got used to that.

Memory bandwidth is getting more important because of powerful integrated graphics, not just on Desktops... But Notebooks, Tablets, Phones and other devices... And to feed that we need faster memory bandwidth.

Also... Higher Frequency Ram has always mattered. Well. Since we moved to on-die memory controllers anyway.
Before that... You were often limited by the FSB speed anyway.
I.E. Having a Core 2 Duo with 800mhz FSB and running Dual-Channel DDR2 1066mhz memory isn't going to suddenly change that FSB bottleneck.
(FSB = 10.6GB/s, Ram = 17GB/s)

vivster said:

CGI-Quality said:

I know some may not realize the significance of this, but it's a big deal. It pushes consumer RAM development up a year, while also! So that's GDDR6 in 2018 (thank you, Volta), with DDR5 in 2019!

Console fans - pay attention!

Do you think RAM technologies for CPU and GPU will ever converge or at least be on the same chip? Or are they just too different? Would be cool if we had completely unified RAM some day with a universal interface. Imagine just taking 2GB RAM from your CPU and plug it into your graphics card because you need more RAM for that now.

They have converged. Sort of.
Low-end GPU's used to come bundled with DDR2 or DDR3 Ram. Desktop chips, not GDDR memory chips.

However... The reason why we won't see something like GDDR5 or GDDR6 memory on the desktop as system memory is actually due to a multitude of reasons...
System memory needs to be low-power... And they often have low latencies as that is important for CPU performance.

GPU's however need all the bandwidth they can get and will drive up clockrates and latencies to achieve that... They also typically need very complex memory controllers... And that can also add a ton of power consumption and cost.

JRPGfan said:

Playstation 4 uses the same memory for both, its cpu & gpu.

It runs with GDDR5.

It also comes with DDR3.

JRPGfan said:

Id love to see a APU equal to a PS4 or better, for cheaper than a "intel cpu + nvidia gpu" is.

With Ryzen AMD are close enough, that the differnce in cpu tech is a meh, between the two.

If your cpu comes with a gpu equal to a ps4 as well? alot of people wouldnt buy intel anymore.

Ryzen Raven Bridge APU's with 704 GCN "Vega" based GPU cores is pretty much your PS4 in an APU.

JRPGfan said:

Theres also some advantages to haveing both cpu+gpu on the same memory.

It allows for "heterogeneous computing".

Think of it this way, right now all your x32 bit programs you run, do so mostly via the cpu.

But the cpu isnt always the most effecient way to do certain tasks, some your gpu can do better.

Nvidia/amd have programs that run more effective on the gpu, than a cpu (like encodeing movies and such).

However  these programs then dont use the cpu, they are a "either-or" situation.

What you have described can easily be done without Heterogeneous computing.

In-fact... You can also have Heterogeneous computing  with split memory pools.

deskpro2k3 said:

but they haven't even fully utilize ddr4 yet. wtf?

It is still 2 years away from releasing.
And it will still take several years more to transition over.

CGI-Quality said:

As was DDR3. Doesn't mean we should stagnate and not march forward. :p

Exactly.