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posted by martyb on Sunday August 18 2019, @12:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the my-first-hard-disk-held-40-MB dept.

Micron shared details of its 3rd generation of "10 nm-class" DRAM fabrication:

Micron's 3rd Generation 10 nm-class (1Z nm) manufacturing process for DRAM will allow the company to increase the bit density, enhance the performance, and the lower power consumption of its DRAM chips as compared to its 2nd Generation 10 nm-class (1Y nm) technology. In particular, the company says that its 16 Gb DDR4 device consumes 40% less power than two 8 Gb DDR4 DRAMs (presumably at the same clocks). Meanwhile, Micron's 16 Gb LPDDR4X ICs will bring an up to 10% power saving. Because of the higher bit density that the new 1Z nm technology provides, it will be cheaper for Micron to produce high-capacity (e.g., 16 Gb) memory chips for lower-cost, high-capacity memory sub-systems.

[...] As for mobile memory, Micron's 16 Gb LPDDR4X chips are rated for transfer rates up to 4266 MT/s. Furthermore, along with offering LPDDR4X DRAM packages with up to 16 GB (8x16Gb) of LPDDR4X for high-end smartphones, Micron will offer UFS-based multichip packages (uMCP4) that integrate NAND for storage and DRAM. The company's uMCP4 family of products aimed at mainstream handsets will include offerings ranging from 64GB+3GB to 256GB+8GB (NAND+DRAM).

Finally, a reasonable amount of RAM for smartphones. But I think we may need at least 24 GB, if not 32 GB.

Related: Xiaomi Announces Smartphones with 10 GB of RAM
Samsung Mass Producing LPDDR5 DRAM (12 Gb x 8 for 12 GB Packages)


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Sunday August 18 2019, @04:01PM (5 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 18 2019, @04:01PM (#881773) Journal

    640 GB ought to be a good starting point for anybody.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @04:51PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @04:51PM (#881800)

    640 GB of ram oughta be enough for everyone!

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Sunday August 18 2019, @05:44PM (3 children)

      by istartedi (123) on Sunday August 18 2019, @05:44PM (#881816) Journal

      I seriously wonder now, at what point in history there was literally 640GB of RAM for everybody, ie, that much RAM on the entire planet. I'm thinking some time in the 1960s, but I really don't know...

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      • (Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 18 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday August 18 2019, @06:53PM (#881830) Journal

        I wasn't around back in the olden days of computing, but my guess would be mid-1970s. The standard form of RAM from the mid-50s through mid-70s was magnetic core RAM [wikipedia.org] (or "core"), which basically needed to be manufactured by hand. Thus, the cost even into the early 1960s was something like $1 per bit. When semiconductor RAM and DRAM were introduced by the early 1970s, their price point had come down to around 1 cent per bit, which allowed them to take over the market.

        As noted in the linked article, by 1970, IBM was producing about 20 billion cores per year, or 20 billion BITS of RAM, so I don't think we were anywhere near 640 billion BYTES of RAM by that time. (Also, just thinking about the manufacturing cost -- even though core RAM was down 1 cent per bit or less by 1970, 640 GB of RAM would have required a worldwide investment of more than $50 billion even at the low 1970 prices. Assuming manufacturing that across the 1960s, it would have likely cost at least $500 billion on RAM alone. For comparison, the entire Apollo space program cost the U.S. about $25 billion. So I don't think it's feasible the globe collectively made it anywhere near 640 GB of RAM worldwide in the 1960s.)

        By the mid-1970s, with semiconductor RAM becoming dominant, chip sizes rapidly shifted upwards from 1 KB initially to 32 KB, and of course then higher. Mass-produced personal computers also started entering the market by the mid-late 1970s. So, I'd guess it's probably more likely we passed the 640 GB threshold in the mid-1970s. Definitely before 1980.

        • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Sunday August 18 2019, @10:06PM

          by istartedi (123) on Sunday August 18 2019, @10:06PM (#881878) Journal

          I had no idea we relied on core for that long. Googling around, I found that semiconductor RAM existed in the mid-60s, but looks to have been expensive and not much capacity being produced. I think you're right.

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        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 19 2019, @01:15AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday August 19 2019, @01:15AM (#881916)

          I bought a "PC" in 1982 for $700. It came with 16K of RAM and I eventually expanded it to 48K for an additional $300. 640GB is 48K x ~13 million. I'd guess world capacity probably hit 640GB in the mid to late 1970s - personal computers didn't really take off until the 1980s, but there would have been millions of business computers in use by 1979.

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