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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Back in October, we reported that Samsung announced an 8 GB LPDDR4-4266 DRAM package [soylentnews.org] for smartphones and other mobile devices. Now, SK Hynix has announced an 8 GB LPDDR4x-4266 DRAM package [anandtech.com] for smartphones. LPDDR4x [wikipedia.org] is a proposed variant to LPDDR4 that is identical, except that the I/O voltage is reduced from 1.1 V to 0.6 V. It is expected to cut the power consumption of the DRAM sub-system by 18-20% (compared to 8 GB LPDDR4-4266).

Oddly enough, Samsung proposed the LPDDR4x variant yet it looks like SK Hynix will beat them to the market:

The first application processor to support the new type of memory is MediaTek's Helio P20 [anandtech.com] that was announced nearly a year ago and the initial devices powered by the chip are likely to hit the market in 1H 2017. Another notable SoC to support LPDDR4X is Qualcomm's new flagship Snapdragon 835, which was announced in November and detailed earlier this month [anandtech.com]. Smartphones featuring this chip will not show up for a while, but MWC just around the corner which lends nicely to various handset announcements.

The 8 GB (64 Gb) LPDDR4X package stacks four 16 Gb DRAM parts that feature a 4266 MT/s data transfer rate and provide up to 34.1 GB/s of bandwidth when connected to an application processor using a 64-bit memory bus. For its 8 GB LPDDR4X solution SK Hynix uses a new 12 mm × 12.7 mm BGA package, which is 30% smaller compared to standard LPDDR4 stacks that come in 15 mm × 15 mm form-factor. SK Hynix's 8 GB LPDDR4X solution has a thickness of less than 1 mm to enable PoP stacking with a mobile application processor or a UFS NAND storage device.

The lineup will eventually be expanded to include packages with less than 8 GB of memory and lower data rates such as 3733 MT/s.

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