SK hynix Inc. has shipped samples of 24 Gigabit (Gb) DDR5 DRAM in what the chip said is   the industry’s largest density for a single DRAM chip.

The term of DDR or Double Data Rate is a comprehensive standard specification defined by JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) and applied to PCs, servers and other applications, evolving from first generation DDR1 to DDR5

Currently, DDR DRAM offerings mostly come in density of 8Gb or 16Gb, with the highest density of 16Gb

The sample release of the high-density DDR5 chip comes 14 months after the world’s second largest chip maker became the first producer ever to release DDR5 DRAM in October 2020.

The second successive release will help further solidify the chipmaker’s technological leadership in DDR5.

The new 24Gb DDR5 was fabricated with a cutting-edge 1a nm technology, the finest of its 10 nm design rule portfolio, utilizing EUV process.

SK hynix’s 10nm chip process technology has evolved from the first generation 1x all way through 1y and 1z to 1a   

It has a density of 24Gb per chip, which is up from the existing density of 16Gb in the 1ynm DDR5, with improved production efficiency and increased speed by up to 33%.

In addition, SK hynix managed to reduce the product’s power consumption by 25%, compared to existing products while lowering energy use in manufacturing through enhanced production efficiency.

SK hynix expects the product to bring about reduction in carbon emissions as well, which is meaningful in the context of ESG management.

The initial offerings on this product are set to be 48 Gigabyte (GB) and 96GB modules for cloud data centers.

It is also expected to power high-performance servers for big data processing such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, as well as realizing Metaverse applications among others.

Kevin (Jongwon) Noh, president and chief marketing officer at SK hynix, said, “In line with the release of 24Gb DDR5, SK hynix is closely engaging with a number of customers that provides cloud services. We will continue to strengthen our leadership in growing DDR5 market by introducing advanced technologies and developing products with ESG-awareness.”

“Intel and SK Hynix have a long history of strong collaboration,” said Carolyn Duran, Vice President of Memory and IO Technologies in Intel’s Data Center and AI Group. 

“Today’s announcement is another illustration of our two companies working together to deliver a 24Gb solution to address needs of our mutual customers.  The 24Gb DDR5 offering provides high mono die capacity and will help customers boost performance of memory capacity bound workloads such as data analytics while bringing significant TCO benefits,” he added.