Samsung, Qualcomm unveil industry’s fastest LPDDR5X DRAM chip

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. said on Tuesday it has successfully proved the performance of its latest LPDDR5X DRAM on Qualcomm Technologies Inc.’s Snapdragon mobile platform at the industry’s fastest speed of 8.5 gigabits per second (Gbps).

Samsung, the world's largest memory chipmaker, said the new chip surpassed its previous maximum speed of 7.5Gbps achieved in March, reaffirming its leadership in the memory market.

“We’re the first in the mobile industry to enable the latest LPDDR5X at 8.5Gbps on Snapdragon mobile platforms, which will enhance user experiences with new features and improved performance for mobile, gaming, camera and AI applications,” said Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm’s vice president of product management.

WIDER USE OF LPDDR DRAM

As a DRAM market leader for more than a decade, Samsung said it has supplied its mobile chips to high-end smartphone makers, enabling consumers to experience powerful computing performance on their mobile devices.

Low-Power Double Data Rate, or LPDDR DRAM, is becoming the standard for a variety of devices because of its low-power and high-performance characteristics, expanding its use beyond smartphones to PCs, high-end computing (HPC) and servers.

LPDDR memory is also an important component in vehicles as a massive amount of data processing is required for autonomous driving.

As the need for faster, smaller and more power-efficient memory increases across various sectors, Samsung said LPDDR DRAM is also expected to be widely used in the artificial intelligence (AI) and metaverse businesses.

“As LPDDR memory continues to broaden its usage beyond smartphones, strong collaboration between memory and SoC vendors is becoming all the more important. Samsung will continue to actively engage with innovators like Qualcomm to enhance ecosystem readiness for future LPDDR standards,” said Daniel Lee, executive vice president of Samsung’s Memory Product Planning Team.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.