Samsung might make the bulk of RAM found in smartphones and tablets, but there are other companies out there, with the most important being SK Hynix. Today they’ve announced a “world’s first” technology, an 8 Gb LPDDR3 memory chip.
Breaking things down, LPDDR3 is currently the fastest form of mobile DRAM. It’s used in high end devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4. Samsung published a press release back in April saying they were the “world’s first” company to make 4 Gb LPDDR3 memory chips. Now since high end devices typically have 2 GB of RAM, that means you need to stack four 4 Gb chips on top of each other. With these new SK Hynix chips, since they’re twice the size in terms of capacity, that means you can expect to see 4 GB smartphones.
When? The press release says this:
“Samples of this new product have been shipped to customers and the company plans to start mass production of it at the end of this year. High density LPDDR3 memory products [with] over 2 GB are expected to be noticeably loaded mainly on to high-end mobile devices from the second half of this year.”
Both the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4 shipped with 2 GB of RAM. The Galaxy S5 might very well be the first 4 GB smartphone we’ll see on the market when it launches next spring. At least I hope.
