American chipmaker Micron has announced that they have started mass production for the world’s first low power LPDDR5 DRAM chip and that it should be available in high-end smartphones very soon. The announcement also confirms that the Xiaomi Mi 10 and the Galaxy S20 will be the first devices to feature this technology.
LPDDR5 DRAM technology is twice as fast as the previous generation (LPDDR4) and is 20% faster than LPDDR4x, both of which are currently used in smartphones. LDDR5 also enables up to 12GB RAM capacity, a transmission rate of up to 6.4GBps, and 50% faster data access speeds.
The chip’s low power state consumes 20% less power and since it needs less time to process data, it also helps save battery life by an additional 5 to 10%.
LPDDR4 RAM did not work well with augmented reality video games, 100-megapixel images, and high-performance video editing, but all of these will now be possible in devices using LPDDR5. Additionally, LPPDR4 would face a bottleneck trying to run 100 apps at the same time, which is a problem LPDDR5 devices will never encounter.
The first half of 2020 is expected to bring smartphones with 8 to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, but the second half is anticipated to bring phones with 16GB RAM.
Micron has confirmed that the Xiaomi Mi 10 will be the first device (expected on Feb 14) to feature this technology in 2020, but since the release date for the Galaxy S20 series (confirmed for Feb 11) is a few days earlier, we suspect that Samsung might just beat Xiaomi to it.