Over the past few hours, Samsung has revealed its first 512GB DDR5 memory module   based on the  new High-K Metal Gate process , also known as HKMG. DDR5, the new commercial DRAM standard, addresses the needs of compute-hungry, high-bandwidth workloads in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning applications. As you may have already noticed, this is a particularly rich period of news for the hardware component market, which will soon see the entry of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti .

As a successor to the popular DDR4, this new look to the future promises to double performance up to 7,200 megabits per second – fast enough to process two 30GB ultra-high definition movies in one second , with the new HKMG solution helping to reduce dispersion. of current. The memory in question can send and receive data signals twice during a single clock cycle and allows for significantly higher transfer rates and capacities.

HKMG technology is traditionally used in logic semiconductors , where it uses a high dielectric material in the insulating layer to reduce current leakage. In DRAM structures this insulating layer is thinned, which often results in a higher leakage current. But with its new DDR5, Samsung has now replaced insulation with HKMG material to not only reduce losses but also use less energy, making it ideal for data centers where energy efficiency is becoming increasingly critical.

The HKMG process was first adopted in the industry in Samsung’s GDDR6 memory released in 2018 before being now extended to DDR5 memory. Samsung said it has now applied through-silicon technology to stack eight layers of 16 gigabit DRAM chips for the industry’s maximum capacity of 512GB . In addition to this module, the company would be sampling different variants of its family to customers, with the help of partners such as Intel. Here are the words of Carolyn Duran, vice president and general manager of memory and IO technology at Intel: