Correct. Skylake supports DDR4, DDR3L, or on some models, LPDDR3. It's a limited voltage range, basically - DDR4 and LPDDR3 are 1.2V, and DDR3L is 1.35V. LPDDR4 is 1.1V - I don't see why it wouldn't be incompatible with Skylake, but they've announced no support for it. Maybe only on the tablet-aimed chips?
Looking forward to smartphones getting 6gb of ram. Too bad cheap ass Apple, who's releasing a $749 "flagship phone" tomorrow with a paltry 16gb of flash, won't be putting 3gb in their phone until the next decade lol.
It's even worse since they are upgrading the camera from 8MP to 12MP and adding 4K video capability which means to actually use these upgraded features, one would run out of space even quicker with just a 16GB model. They are basically banking on making an extra $80+ when users end up stepping up to the 64GB model out of necessity. Pure money grab.
I am guessing since the iPhone and iOS perform better with their "low" amounts of RAM than most Android flagships phones do with more RAM they don't feel the pressure to upgrade their devices.
Maybe when Android phones start performing much better with their high end hardware Apple will feel the need to up their game. And you are probably right, that won't happen until next decade.
smartthanyou, so you're pretty much saying they were stupid to put in 2GB of RAM in their iPads. It's pretty much the same thing as an iPhone, just in a larger package.
Here's the thing, even with my (work-provided) iPad Air 2 with 2 gb of ram, it's already having to constantly re-load large web pages when switching tabs for me and my medical charting app. I would welcome 6gb of ram any day.
It's hilarious how the apple sheep defend their paltry ram stating the reason for 1gb of ram on the original 6/6+ was that '2gb of RAM uses a ton of more battery than 1gb of ram'. Stupid stupid stupid. It's planned obsolescence, idiots! Besides, having to constantly fire up the wifi/LTE radios kill the battery much faster than extra ram ever would.
Wake up, update iOS to 9.0 and smell the coffee dude (Slideover, Split-Screen and Picture-in-Picture, among lots of other goodies within Safari, Notes, Search, Maps etc).
I haven't used Android so I can't correctly say, but all of my coworkers are sporting LG G3's at the office, and they don't seem to run into any lag during usage.
Personally, I think iOS devices could use a little bit more RAM than currently implemented, so they hold their values longer for the power users.
they gotta make people upgrade their phones at least once every 3 years, else people would just keep the same phone for 5 years or long.. It's a intentional handicap, one they can manipulate by making iOS 9, iOS 10, etc.. use more ram
Considering how long they're sticking with 1GB and how few RAM devouring features they have left to implement, they won't be in any rush. I fully expect Apple to sit on 2GB for atleast 3 years and move to 4GB in 2022.
6GB in a phone or ARM tablet is nuts! The BoM increase over 4GB would be much better suited to something noticeable like better quality NAND at this point IMO. Hoping this is used more for upcoming LPDDR4 support in laptops and servers and lowering cost of having 3GB in mobile.
With 4K resolution filtering down to the tablet and (for some ungodly reason) the smartphone market, 4GB of RAM is going to be essential to driving those displays. Remember, SoC GPU's use shared system memory as texture cache and other GPU duties. Considering how powerful GPU's are becoming in the mobile market, it won't be long before we have Battlefield 4 and GTA V (AAA) level games on smartphones.
Sure, 4GB, no argument there. But 6GB will be excessive for some time, gaming will still be internally rendered well below native resolution because of the compute and bandwidth bottlenecks.
It's a matter of cost, the benefit simply won't be worth the 10-15$ it will cost the OEM at this point. More cores is quite different, core count doesn't have a direct relationship with cost so it's much more a performance balancing act between workloads.
In high end pricing is not such a huge problem, RAM prices have dropped a lot this year, 4GB LPDDR4 might be getting close to 30$ now. In sub 150$ phones having 3GB is more of a BOM problem and the ecosystem should be paying more attention to memory management in general. NAND speeds are evolving , the fastest claimed eMMC speeds i've seen so far are from Hynix with 780MB/s and 160MB/s read/write and random read/write at 32,000 IOPS and 17,000 IOPS - we'll see how it does in practice. What might be a problem with 6GB is power,wish we had some info on that.
There are still BoM targets in the high end, companies won't or atleast shouldn't arbitrarily put 6GB in a device until there is a need. It'll be 10-15$ between 4 and 6GB this year, that's not a minor bump at volume, Note5 being 6GB would be nearly 0.5B$ profit lost right there if they didn't also increase the retail price.
Think of it this way. When you are selling 100+ million devices over its retail life, decreasing the per-device profit by even just 50 cents will mean a reduction of 50+ million dollars in overall profit.
And as you know, Apple has no problem selling millions of its devices regardless of how much RAM is in their devices.
In the Note 5 you got 4GB at 30+$, the SoC+modem at 50+, the screen at 70+$. Some 150$ phones have a 15$ SoC, a 20$ 1080p display and 3GB of RAM and that's why there RAM is the bigger problem. Also keep in mind that we won't actually see 6GB in many phones or all that soon and by that time RAM prices will be significantly lower. Besides, what i said is "not such a huge problem"so don't read it as no problem at all.
Ofc there are but it's not a huge problem since as a % of the BOM it doesn't go up by a lot , keep in mind that we are unlikely to see phones with 6GB this year and maybe very few next year The RAM content is a much bigger problem bellow high end where ,as a % of the BOM, it gets crazy and sometimes the RAM costs more than the display or the SoC.
You continue to ignore that there is no immediate need for 6GB; even if next year 6GB costs the same as 4GB does today the price of 4GB will too have decreased proportionately. As I originally said, the best course would be to put the savings elsewhere to give some real product improvements like better NAND. Decrease the % BoM that RAM consumes as it's increasingly cheap to have enough.
Yes, power is a problem, as DRAM can not be powered down like one can for grapchics and compute sections. My home computer has 4GB memory. Where an earth would mobile device require 6GB memory? I think we move forward when cumpute platforms move over to unified memory when phase shift, mram or xpoint technology replaces traditional division between mass storage and main memory.
isn't the bigger deal here that it essentially halves the pcb area required to make a 3GB phone freeing up space for other things like battery? Better yet, can we get a cheap x86 windows tablet with more than 2GB of ram with this? Or will this not work with AMD/Intel controllers? I would just love to see something like a T100 with 3 of these modules getting above that 4GB barrier of usefulness in a Windows tablet.
All 4 of the current Braswell Atom processors (mobile/desktop) support 8GB of DDR3L, and all but the weakest Cherry Trail (tablet) ones support 8GB of LPDDR3. The upcoming Apollo Lake, which replaces Braswell, is supposed to support LPDDR4. While the mobile/desktop Atoms do carry a much higher TDP than the tablet ones (4W vs 2W), a Windows tablet that's 10" or larger should be fine dissipating that heat.
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Shadow7037932 - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
What's the difference between this LPDDR4 and the LPDDR4 that'll be used with say Skylake?secretmanofagent - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I could be wrong, but Skylake doesn't seem to support LPDDR4, just DDR4. http://anandtech.com/show/9582/intel-skylake-mobil...makerofthegames - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Correct. Skylake supports DDR4, DDR3L, or on some models, LPDDR3. It's a limited voltage range, basically - DDR4 and LPDDR3 are 1.2V, and DDR3L is 1.35V. LPDDR4 is 1.1V - I don't see why it wouldn't be incompatible with Skylake, but they've announced no support for it. Maybe only on the tablet-aimed chips?Shadow7037932 - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Thanks. You are correct.Pneumothorax - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Looking forward to smartphones getting 6gb of ram. Too bad cheap ass Apple, who's releasing a $749 "flagship phone" tomorrow with a paltry 16gb of flash, won't be putting 3gb in their phone until the next decade lol.RussianSensation - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
It's even worse since they are upgrading the camera from 8MP to 12MP and adding 4K video capability which means to actually use these upgraded features, one would run out of space even quicker with just a 16GB model. They are basically banking on making an extra $80+ when users end up stepping up to the 64GB model out of necessity. Pure money grab.ThisIsChrisKim - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
Well, Apple is, first and foremost, a business.smartthanyou - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I am guessing since the iPhone and iOS perform better with their "low" amounts of RAM than most Android flagships phones do with more RAM they don't feel the pressure to upgrade their devices.Maybe when Android phones start performing much better with their high end hardware Apple will feel the need to up their game. And you are probably right, that won't happen until next decade.
menting - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
smartthanyou, so you're pretty much saying they were stupid to put in 2GB of RAM in their iPads. It's pretty much the same thing as an iPhone, just in a larger package.airmanchairman - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
The new Slideover, split-screen and Picture-in-Picture features of the latest iPads clearly justify the increased RAM in Apple's latest iPads, duh!id4andrei - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
They perform so well that they're unable to hold more than 2 safari tabs loaded.Pneumothorax - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
Here's the thing, even with my (work-provided) iPad Air 2 with 2 gb of ram, it's already having to constantly re-load large web pages when switching tabs for me and my medical charting app. I would welcome 6gb of ram any day.It's hilarious how the apple sheep defend their paltry ram stating the reason for 1gb of ram on the original 6/6+ was that '2gb of RAM uses a ton of more battery than 1gb of ram'. Stupid stupid stupid. It's planned obsolescence, idiots! Besides, having to constantly fire up the wifi/LTE radios kill the battery much faster than extra ram ever would.
airmanchairman - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
Wake up, update iOS to 9.0 and smell the coffee dude (Slideover, Split-Screen and Picture-in-Picture, among lots of other goodies within Safari, Notes, Search, Maps etc).osxandwindows - Monday, September 28, 2015 - link
Its iOS not the ram, pc with 2gb of ram can keep multiple tabs openjonminchoi - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
I haven't used Android so I can't correctly say, but all of my coworkers are sporting LG G3's at the office, and they don't seem to run into any lag during usage.Personally, I think iOS devices could use a little bit more RAM than currently implemented, so they hold their values longer for the power users.
Morawka - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
they gotta make people upgrade their phones at least once every 3 years, else people would just keep the same phone for 5 years or long.. It's a intentional handicap, one they can manipulate by making iOS 9, iOS 10, etc.. use more ramsonicmerlin - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
I really, really hope Apple steps up their mobile devices to 3 GB in a year or two instead of waiting another 3 years to jump to 4 GB.frostyfiredude - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Considering how long they're sticking with 1GB and how few RAM devouring features they have left to implement, they won't be in any rush. I fully expect Apple to sit on 2GB for atleast 3 years and move to 4GB in 2022.frostyfiredude - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
6GB in a phone or ARM tablet is nuts! The BoM increase over 4GB would be much better suited to something noticeable like better quality NAND at this point IMO. Hoping this is used more for upcoming LPDDR4 support in laptops and servers and lowering cost of having 3GB in mobile.Samus - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
With 4K resolution filtering down to the tablet and (for some ungodly reason) the smartphone market, 4GB of RAM is going to be essential to driving those displays. Remember, SoC GPU's use shared system memory as texture cache and other GPU duties. Considering how powerful GPU's are becoming in the mobile market, it won't be long before we have Battlefield 4 and GTA V (AAA) level games on smartphones.frostyfiredude - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Sure, 4GB, no argument there. But 6GB will be excessive for some time, gaming will still be internally rendered well below native resolution because of the compute and bandwidth bottlenecks.nikaldro - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
More ram is never too much (within sane amounts).People complained about core count, yet it's proved that even browsers can use 8 cores.
frostyfiredude - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
It's a matter of cost, the benefit simply won't be worth the 10-15$ it will cost the OEM at this point. More cores is quite different, core count doesn't have a direct relationship with cost so it's much more a performance balancing act between workloads.mkozakewich - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Mobile games often can't use the native resolution. They'll render smaller and then upscale.jjj - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
In high end pricing is not such a huge problem, RAM prices have dropped a lot this year, 4GB LPDDR4 might be getting close to 30$ now. In sub 150$ phones having 3GB is more of a BOM problem and the ecosystem should be paying more attention to memory management in general.NAND speeds are evolving , the fastest claimed eMMC speeds i've seen so far are from Hynix with 780MB/s and 160MB/s read/write and random read/write at 32,000 IOPS and 17,000 IOPS - we'll see how it does in practice.
What might be a problem with 6GB is power,wish we had some info on that.
frostyfiredude - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
There are still BoM targets in the high end, companies won't or atleast shouldn't arbitrarily put 6GB in a device until there is a need. It'll be 10-15$ between 4 and 6GB this year, that's not a minor bump at volume, Note5 being 6GB would be nearly 0.5B$ profit lost right there if they didn't also increase the retail price.jonminchoi - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
frostyfiredude is correct.Think of it this way. When you are selling 100+ million devices over its retail life, decreasing the per-device profit by even just 50 cents will mean a reduction of 50+ million dollars in overall profit.
And as you know, Apple has no problem selling millions of its devices regardless of how much RAM is in their devices.
jjj - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
In the Note 5 you got 4GB at 30+$, the SoC+modem at 50+, the screen at 70+$.Some 150$ phones have a 15$ SoC, a 20$ 1080p display and 3GB of RAM and that's why there RAM is the bigger problem.
Also keep in mind that we won't actually see 6GB in many phones or all that soon and by that time RAM prices will be significantly lower. Besides, what i said is "not such a huge problem"so don't read it as no problem at all.
jjj - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
Ofc there are but it's not a huge problem since as a % of the BOM it doesn't go up by a lot , keep in mind that we are unlikely to see phones with 6GB this year and maybe very few next year The RAM content is a much bigger problem bellow high end where ,as a % of the BOM, it gets crazy and sometimes the RAM costs more than the display or the SoC.frostyfiredude - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
You continue to ignore that there is no immediate need for 6GB; even if next year 6GB costs the same as 4GB does today the price of 4GB will too have decreased proportionately. As I originally said, the best course would be to put the savings elsewhere to give some real product improvements like better NAND. Decrease the % BoM that RAM consumes as it's increasingly cheap to have enough.jive - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
Yes, power is a problem, as DRAM can not be powered down like one can for grapchics and compute sections. My home computer has 4GB memory. Where an earth would mobile device require 6GB memory?I think we move forward when cumpute platforms move over to unified memory when phase shift, mram or xpoint technology replaces traditional division between mass storage and main memory.
Eden-K121D - Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - link
You never know about the futureCaedenV - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
isn't the bigger deal here that it essentially halves the pcb area required to make a 3GB phone freeing up space for other things like battery?Better yet, can we get a cheap x86 windows tablet with more than 2GB of ram with this? Or will this not work with AMD/Intel controllers? I would just love to see something like a T100 with 3 of these modules getting above that 4GB barrier of usefulness in a Windows tablet.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
It won't work with the currently announced Intel chips. Maybe a future Atom chip will support it.Smudgeous - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
All 4 of the current Braswell Atom processors (mobile/desktop) support 8GB of DDR3L, and all but the weakest Cherry Trail (tablet) ones support 8GB of LPDDR3. The upcoming Apollo Lake, which replaces Braswell, is supposed to support LPDDR4. While the mobile/desktop Atoms do carry a much higher TDP than the tablet ones (4W vs 2W), a Windows tablet that's 10" or larger should be fine dissipating that heat.jwcalla - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link
I thought phones used a PoP methodology where the RAM is sandwiched right on top of the processor?Eden-K121D - Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - link
they do