New DDR4 memory to give Apple products a speed boost

RAMIconXIn 2013, Apple memory provider Micron technologies gave a presentation on the progression of their product line, outlining both the increasing DRAM requirements of the mobile industry as well as the options provided by their new Low Power DDR4 memory technology.

At twice the bandwidth of current offerings, Micron’s new RAM technology offers not only faster performance than the current LPDDR3, but also offers easier connections, less power draw, and lower costs than prior modules, leading to speculation that the modules will soon find their ways into Apple’s entire product line.

The new LPDDR4 memory uses a dual channel architecture with eight banks per channel, increases the performance throughput from 17GB/s to about 34GB/s for an x64 memory subsystem. Not only does this increase the overall speed, but offers lower latency for RAM access.

Micron memory roadmap

Micron’s memory roadmap suggests low power DDR4 will be available starting in 2014 (© Micron Technologies).

Since one of Apple’s current memory providers is Micron technologies, and since Apple has used Micron’s LPDDR3 memory in its products for 2013, it is likely that Apple is gearing up to use this memory in its next Mac, iPhone, and iPad models. Not only will they provide increased performance, but will do so without compromising battery life and in fact may increase battery performance.

2 thoughts on “New DDR4 memory to give Apple products a speed boost”

  2. carpetbomberz

    The new, new thing in DDR4 is the “race to sleep”. These designs are optimized to execute and complete all the steps in a read and write cycle and return to low power mode as fast as possible. So you get the same read/write performance as the previous gen (some speed ups are possible but not nearly as big as we’re used to in past generations). But you do get the big benefit of returning to sleep state as fast as the memory chips can do it.

Comments are closed.