Samsung begins producing new 20nm-class DDR3 RAM for mobile devices that’s smaller, better, faster, stronger
When it comes to smartphone components, most people immediately attribute a device’s overall speed to its processor, much like the car engine, and they’d be right — partly. With the CPU wars still fresh in everyone’s mind, will throwing a few extra cores in a device really going to provide for a dramatic increase in speed? Probably not. But there’s another vital system component most people forget when judging a smartphone’s speed: RAM.
The unsung hero of smartphones, ever since 2GB became a staple, most apps used on a daily basis are just hanging out, chilling in a phone’s RAM, waiting to be summoned up by the user (as opposed to opening from a cold stop via the CPU). In the Galaxy S4, we’ve finally seen Samsung upgrade the RAM — not in size, but in speed — opting for a faster DDR3 (as opposed to the DDR2 found in the previous gen Galaxy S).
It looks like Samsung isn’t about to stop there. Today, Samsung has officially announced their 4Gb 20 nanometer-class low power DDR3 RAM for mobile devices, promising speeds of 2,133 Mbps. That’s about a 30% increase in speed over previous 30-nnm DDR3 RAM (and almost double that of DDR2). The best part? A 20% decrease in power consumption. Yum.
Samsung announced their plans to ramp up production of their latest generation mobile RAM sometime later this year. No word on when we can expect it in Android devices, but I’d guess sometime in 2014 and I’m already frothing at the mouth.