Here’s everything we know about DDR5.
The consumer release of DDR5 should coincide with the launch of Intel’s Alder Lake-S CPUs later this year. Corsair reaffirms that the release is imminent in a recent blog post, saying DDR5 memory is coming “soon”.
Unfortunately, AMD’s Zen 3+ processors are next up from the red team, and these won’t support DDR5. Instead, AMD users will have to wait for Zen 4, which is expected to land on shelves in 2022.
DDR5 brings some incremental improvements over the previous standard. Unlike the maximum 32GB capacity on a DDR4 DIMM stick, DDR5 raises this to a potential 128GB per module. It’s up to program and game developers to code their software to take advantage of all this extra capacity, however.
The base frequency of DDR5 starts at 4,800MHz, rising up to a maximum 8,400MHz – higher than even the most extreme overclocks on DDR4. You can expect the average clock speeds to lie somewhere in between, however, as frequencies are tied to your processor.
Early adoption costs for the new memory standard are likely to be high, like we saw with DDR4’s initial release. DDR4 is by no means outdated yet, so you might want to hold out on the next generation of memory until prices settle.
It doesn’t seem like all Alder Lake rigs will be capable of running the latest standard, as motherboard manufacturers plan to create both DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards for the new LGA 1700 socket.
AMD rigs won’t see DDR5 until 2022 with Zen 4, as the future Zen 3+ refresh isn’t expected to support the upcoming memory standard.