JEDEC DDR5 memory will offer improved performance with greater power efficiency as compared to previous generation DRAM technologies. As planned, DDR5 will provide double the bandwidth and density over DDR4, along with delivering improved channel efficiency.These enhancements, combined with a more user-friendly interface for server and client platforms, will enable high performance and improved power management in a wide variety of applications.
I’m still using DDR3, planning a PC upgrade which will include DDR4, and DDR5 is already in the pipeline.
I’m still using a Haswell Core i5 SFF (a Dell Optiplex, in case anyone cares) with 16GB of DDR3 RAM for work (software development). When I hit the ‘buy’ button on this thing in 2013, I thought it would get replaced at most four years later. Now, however, I think it will not see itself getting replaced for at least another two years. I don’t think DDR5 will become mainstream in two years.
Edit: There’s something wrong with OSAlert. It keeps refreshing itself every few seconds, but not on every page.
Edited 2017-04-01 07:15 UTC
And I’m still on an athlon II x4 640 for my dev box…which acts mostly as a terminal into a couple of dual ivy xeon boxes.
Ryzen might push intel to include support for ddr5 if intel actually decides to finally actually try to compete instead of using their entrenched position to try to hold amd off.
That is something both AMD and Intel are having issues with which is this simple fact…software hasn’t kept up with hardware so most of the tasks people do can be run quite well on several year old hardware. Heck there are channels on YouTube that do nothing but test older chips for gaming and even with the latest titles and they have to get REALLY old, we’re talking Pentium D levels of old, before they can find chips that can’t do 30 FPS.
So I’d say these new tech are gonna take several years to become the mainstream simply because so many are happy with what they have. Once we switched from the MHz wars to Core Wars the systems just got too powerful for the jobs mainstream users, in my own case during the Mhz wars I used to build a new system every other year like clockwork, now? Now I have an octocore with 16gb of RAM with 2 RAM slots left if I decide I need more down the road and all my games run 90FPS+ even while recording, like many others I see zero reason to spend several hundred building a new system when I’m not even close to maxxing out what I have.
And what would DDR 5 do for me that the DDR 3 I have now not do? All my programs run in RAM anyway so the difference would be measured in nanoseconds, certainly not anything I could possibly feel.
Where DDR5 will be seen the most first is video cards. The performance boost from DDR3 (from which most graphics memory is currently derived) will allow them to boost performance on 4K rendering. Gotta get those 4K games running at 100FPS, now, right?
Companies will find a way to sell..
Like the new trend of higher refresh rate monitors, 8K resolutions, features that are available only on a specific platform (nvme, octane), VR capability..
Problem is most are in the business of selling hardware only and aren’t actually very much interested in software support for it (if any).
Edited 2017-04-04 08:31 UTC
GDDR5 (the memory in the PS4) is NOT the same thing as DDR5. GDDR5 is a derivative of DDR3 (so is GDDR4).
Thank goodness someone cleared that up about it being GDDR5 rather than DDR5 .. about an hour before the main story was posted I just dropped for a DDR4 based upgrade.
Much head-desking.
About a year ago, my 8 years old core2duo E7200, overclocked by some %20, gave its last breath, and I moved on to that magnificent thing G3258 is. At 4 GHz, it does anything I expect of it (mostly office stuff, browsing, and some translation software).
Did I need to upgrade my 8 years old gig? Nope. Do I need to upgrade this one? Nope. A $400 CPU with 32 GB of DDR5 won’t work noticeably faster than my $60 CPU with 8 GB of DDR4, for the tasks I have. And 99% of computer users are with me on this.
I do realize, had I been a designer rendering images on 3d max, or a coder compiling huge executables, I might have benefited from 16 core madness or 2.5 GHz ram speeds. But I am not, and so isn’t most of the people who are more and more inclined to see computers as web browsers with keyboards and mouses.
I wouldn’t worry much. Outside of very specific use cases (computer learning, large scale databases, build farms, etc), you probably won’t see much actual difference in performance. For typical home users (web browsing, email, and possibly light streaming and/or word processing), there will be no measurable difference until another round of unnecessary software bloat hits again. For developers, there likely won’t be much difference unless they’re dealing with some of the specific use cases, or are building software in RAM. Gamers might see some improvement, but I’d be willing to bet that it won’t be much, since DDR4 can already outperform generation 4 PCI-e (Gen4 PCI-E is roughly 32GB/s for 16 lanes, if you assume a high-end system (IOW, th4e type of system that would be using DDR5), then it’s easily possible to get upside of 34-36GB/s from DDR4).