Should you upgrade to DDR5

DDR5 is the newest and latest version of DDR memory/
some of the benefits you’re gonna see
versus ddr4 the platform thoughts you
have to take into mind inevitably this
always happens they announce a product
or they announce a new spec or a new
family of products
way in advance time ellipses or lapses
whichever and then right before it
launches you start going through that
panic of like oh crap should i upgrade
to this is it worth it i don’t know i
just so today we’re gonna have some food
for thought we’re gonna talk about it
talk about some respects some of the
things to expect versus ddr4 and the use
cases where you might actually want to
consider upgrading to a ddr5 platform
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so starting off we need to talk about
some of the improvements of ddr5 versus
ddr4 ddr5 is a
quite a bit of a jump over ddr4 more so
than how ddr4 felt like over ddr3
although the jumps might look similar in
terms of percentage changes we are
seeing some
pretty extreme upticks here
so in terms of the data rates um
1600 to 3200 mega transfers per second
when it comes to ddr4 and remember
the speed over a family of ram the
generation of ram increases as the
manufacturing process improves as the
yields improve you’ll find that it gets
faster so for instance ddr4 launched at
2133
being the the the speed and then you
would see
um 2400 dimms and then 2600 and then
2800 and then 3000 and then 32 and then
34 36 and it’s like 200 megahertz bumps
every time
so when you see a range like this in
terms of the transfers per second
then it’s kind of accounting for that
type of speed improvement
um
ddr5 however
it’s
baseline transfer rate is 3200 so that’s
where ddr4 fairly maxed out
that’s where ddr5 starts and we’re
seeing a 2x
transfer rate improvement in ddr5 over
ddr4 up to 6400 mtps
so already that’s massive but the other
side of the coin
is the capacities when ddr3 was phased
out for ddr4 2 gigabyte and 4 gigabyte
sticks were fairly common they did have
eight gigabyte sticks of ddr3 so eight
gigabyte sticks of ddr4 being the
standard uh you know four gigabyte
sticks obviously were available but
eight gigabyte kind of became the
standard that people were getting
wasn’t that much of a capacity
improvement most motherboards were
guaranteed to support 64 gigs of ram
some motherboards would go as high as
128 gigabytes of ram uh but that was it
dependent on the motherboard depending
on the platform what i mean by that is
you had mainstream right which was like
a standard intel cpu or even a ryzen cpu
didn’t support nearly as much ram as say
a quad channel board like x299 or even
threadripper would support so that’s why
you see those ranges there but we’re
seeing
four times the capacity per per uh chip
on ddr5 versus dr4 so ddr4 is a single
dim like one stick of ram maxed out at
32 gigabytes
we’re seeing
eight gigabytes
to 64 gigabytes per stick per stick

so what that means is you could have two
sticks of ram
and have 128 gigabytes
of memory now there’s a lot of other
stuff that we could talk about here in
terms of boost length refresh uh
commands all the bank groups all that
sort of stuff you can essentially just
assume everything has either doubled or
quadrupled double or quadrupled
depending on the spec and that that is a
massive
improvement the best part about it all
is it’s doing it with less voltage
so 1.5 volts
uh was fairly the standard was pretty
much a standard for ddr3 ddr4 was 1.2
volts but now we’re seeing 1.1 volts as
the standard for ddr5 so you’re seeing
double
the data rate quadruple
the amount of ram chips on the dim
and it’s doing it with less voltage so
that’s that’s just it’s awesome to see
moore’s law is still alive and well now
should you
upgrade to ddr5 or ddr5 platform well
the first thing you have to understand
is to adopt ddr5 means you’re gonna have
to adopt an entirely new platform the
new ram obviously a new cpu and a new
motherboard so
if you’re going to be
building an alder lake system anyway
you’re probably going to want to just
get ddr5 if the price isn’t completely
astronomical we’ve seen unfortunate
dram prices tend to kind of go through
this sort of a sine wave sort of a sort
of a pattern where when they first
launch they’re extremely expensive and
then they become the norm and they come
way down and now obviously everything’s
expensive because of obvious reasons
launching a brand new platform
when there’s limited availability of
chips and dies means it’s probably going
to launch dollar per gigabyte
much higher than we saw with ddr4 which
i guess means you could save a few bucks
if you get a new platform like the alder
lake system or whatever amd’s going to
launch it’s going to obviously use ddr5
as well you could save some money by
running ddr4 no word yet on whether or
not dd amd is going to backwards support
on their platform ddr4 and ddr5 just
like intel is doing i would have to
assume they’re going to do that if intel
can do it but you would save a little
bit of money by running ddr4 in the
meantime and then prices come down
upgrade to ddr5 and you know you would
see that uptick in performance
so already you’re buying a new cpu
you’re buying a new motherboard that
doesn’t seem worth it
if you just want to adopt ddr5
if your tasks that you’re doing are not
going to leverage that ram speed and now
it’s not just ram speed it’s capacity as
well though but if you’re doing
something like
video editing
or
photoshop or 3d modeling all three of
those have a very different requirement
when it comes to system memory and how
it’s accessed we’ll talk about video
rendering first
since that’s the one that obviously we
do more of around here most people
rendering
or doing video editing
are going to probably have 32 to 64
gigabytes of uh systems ram fast mem
memory and having
more of it is not going to help your
render time so it’s only going to help
you during your actual accessing of the
footage while you’re in your timeline
photoshop editors or photo editors on
the other hand especially if you’re
dealing with like raw files or very
large format files or you deal with 40
megapixel files that’s a massive amount
of data that’s trying to be accessed at
one time especially if you’re trying to
access an entire library all of that
wants to be stored into memory because
as you see the preview as you load the
file gets loaded into memory and you can
swap between them faster now if you have
four times the memory capacity and you
have twice the speed
that’s obviously going to potentially
give you much more productivity less
downtime less waiting which is going to
equal productivity
gamers are probably
not going to benefit from this in any
way whatsoever gamers are going to
definitely benefit from the e-core
p-core thing that we saw in intel and
hopefully amd brings something similar
to that sort of concept that way you
have essentially two completely separate
cpu types that are doing different
things independent of each other without
giving you any sort of slowdown where
one has to wait on the other that’s
going to be far more beneficial than the
actual memory itself so we definitely
are going to do some
content with alder lake when it comes up
of ddr4 versus ddr5 on the same platform
when it comes to gaming 3d modeling talk
about that one 3d modeling is 100
graphics card dependent it’s all done on
the graphics card any 3d modeler will
tell you graphics card
i mean we’ve we’ve done tests we’ve
showed how cpu is like eight times
slower
and it’s for the reasons that we just
mentioned fast access ram gddr 6x is
extremely fast way faster than any
system ram 24 gigabytes on something
like the 30 90 or 16 gigabytes on like a
6900 xt
is going to give you the frame buffer
that you need to be able to render out
those scenes remember when it comes to
3d modeling it’s essentially doing ray
tracing one frame at a time and if
you’re doing a a 3d
scene if you will where it moves or
whatever it’s one frame at a time where
it does all that math and it all takes
place on the graphics card system memory
although has its requirements when it
comes to those programs all the work is
being done on gpu so there’s probably
going to be a lot less of a benefit
there than having say some ridiculously
overpowered productivity card like some
quattro or tesla or something out there
versus um
you know having a fast cpu and fast
memory to go along with it i still fully
believe that it’s the photoshop editors
and the photographers are going to see
the full benefit of ddr5 versus ddr4 but
your entire system snap you know
responsiveness is also going to improve
with ddr5 the amount of ram the amount
of stuff that could be placed in ram
before it has to go to a page file and
swap it to the disk
and the speed of it i mean we’re talking
ddr5 8400
modules are potentially on the horizon
but we’re seeing modules that are going
to be starting somewhere in the 6 000
platform
i mean the fastest ram we have in this
office right now which is 900
per dual ch or dual stick
two channel is the crucial 5100
5100 and we’re talking about starting
speeds there and 6000 with ddr5 right
out of the gate
so you want to talk about the amount of
speed we’re going to see with ram
also too advancements in ram like this
are going to advance the
uh the the way that
developers can actually leverage and
access that ramp if you like to play
with ram discs
be the fastest discs on the planet as
soon as ddr5 comes up anyway just a
little food for thought here ddr5 people
have been asking me whether or not to
platform worth upgrading to because
later this month alder lake
announcements are happening there’s no
secret there everyone knows it’s coming
and because we’re only a few weeks away
from that people are starting to really
now pay attention to ddr5 and they’re
asking whether or not it’s worth
upgrading to so there you go guys are
you upgrading to ddr5 means you’re
adopting intel are you going to wait for
amd to come out with something with ddr5
and if you specifically have a job or a
workflow or a hobby or whatever
that can
truly leverage that much ram and that
speed of it and i’m not just about like
vms yeah vms obviously the the more ram
the faster the ram the better because
it’s all being shared what’s a real
world use case scenario where you are
excited about ddr5 because it’s
literally going to make your life easier
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