At Intel’s “Intel Innovation” summit, SK Hynix was on hand to showcase some of the new DDR5 memory modules. In addition to DIMMs and SO-DIMMs, there were also RDIMMs and, more rarely, unconventional capacities of 48GB and 96GB DDR5 memory.
Memory capacities have been mostly increasing in capacity by the power of 2, such as 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB to 128GB, etc. According to Servethehome, SK Hynix’s 48GB and 96GB are both DDR5 RDIMMs at 5600MHz and 6400MHz, with the former likely to be the JEDEC standard frequency supported by Sapphire Rapids.
It is understood that SK Hynix is continuing to move forward with development work in this area and will next offer 192GB capacity. 256GB of DDR5-5600 RDIMMs were also on display, allowing servers to reach 4TB capacity per socket (eight channels, two RDIMMs per channel).
SK Hynix also explained the reason why it is launching unconventional capacity memory like 48GB and 96GB, speculating that it may be related to price. DDR5 is much more expensive than DDR4 memory initially, and if the capacity continues to double up, there is a larger gap between both system capacity and construction cost, and a breakthrough from capacity could provide a relative compromise solution for customers.
This unconventional capacity DDR5 memory will not be exclusive to SK Hynix, rumour has it that both Micron and Samsung are planning to do so and are developing 48GB and 96GB DDR5 RDIMMs, although they were not on display. It is foreseeable that, at least in servers, memory capacity will change the past history of increasing capacity in powers of 2.
