Since launch, DDR5 has been an incredibly expensive part of the PC building puzzle, but ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES believes we could see pricing drop considerably compared with DDR4 into next year and “potentially cross over as we get into the middle of next year, ” says David McAfee.
AMD announced its new Ryzen 7000-series processors (opens in new tab) this week, with a whole new AM5 platform built to support both PCIe 5. 0 and DDR5. Like most new technology recently, the new memory kits have either been impossible to find, or are hugely costly, far more so than the established DDR4 modules.
Intel was the first to offer support for the latest memory standard with the Alder Lake CPUs (opens in new tab) , but built in backwards compatibility with DDR4 within order in order to still be able to offer a more affordable way in to the system. That has been necessary given the prohibitive pricing, plus lack of stock of DDR5 memory segments around Intel’s last launch.
AMD, however, isn’t giving itself a way out of DDR5 support with its AM5 platform, and is going all-in right from the outset. A year down the particular line from Intel’s Alder Lake release and that decision’s making more sense. For one it means ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES doesn’t have to waste resources providing compatibility with regard to an outgoing hardware specification, but also pricing and availability possess changed the lot in the past three months or so.
AMD isn’t relying on the work Intel has done with the XMP features for DDR5, either. It has already been working with memory manufacturers to create a new open standard regarding overclocking memory space profiles, called EXPO (opens in new tab) .
“It’s clear that DDR5 is the correct choice today, ” states McAfee at the Ryzen 7000 announcement event in Austin, “and one that is built for the future as the technology continues to mature over time.
“And we know that Ryzen enthusiasts love to overclock their storage, to ensure they’re getting the fastest data rates and the particular lowest memory latencies in order to maximise game performance. And that’s why the AM5 platform is also being introduced with ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES EXPO technology for extended profiles intended for overclocking. ”
At start there will be around 15 different EXPO packages available that will be completely compatible with the brand new AMD system. And if anyone remembers what a nightmare it was obtaining the original Ryzen to run with various DDR4 memory space kits, that will become a welcome start to get AM5.
EXPO will allow for one-click overclocking through the JEDEC standard of DDR5-5200 all the way up to DDR5-6400. And AMD is already seeing up in order to 11% higher gaming frame rates from flipping on that EXPO BIOS switch.
AM5 motherboards will, nevertheless, continue to assistance Intel’s own XMP regular in the same way that will the long-lived AM4 platform has been.
“We will support out-of-the-box overclocking with XMP memory products as well, inch explains McAfee. “I expect it will be the little bit better tuned on EXPO DIMM sets than it is XMP profile kits, but certainly those Expo kits are usually optimised to work on the AMD AM5 platform. ”
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But that will count for little if those high-end DDR5 memory packages continue in order to be therefore extravagantly priced as they have been.
“What we anticipate to observe even in the remainder associated with this calendar year, ” says McAfee, “is more aggressive movement from the memory partners to accelerate pricing declines, get DDR5 pricing closer to DDR4 prices. And, I think as all of us go into 2023, we’ll notice that gap narrow even further, potentially crossover as we all enter into the middle of the coming year. inch
The pricing crossover event will be an important one for DDR5, effectively making it the de facto standard for PERSONAL COMPUTER RAM. AMD’s prediction associated with mid-2023 will be, however, still going to be a guess, however educated, and the actual timing of this prices inflection point may well end up being much later directly into 2023.