AMD targets 2022 for DDR5

AMD is expected to support the DDR5 memory standard by 2022 if leaked internal documents are anything to go by. 

Via a report at MyDrivers which features an internal AMD roadmap, it appears that AMD is seeing 2022 the start of DDR5 support for its range which should bring many advantages. Notably, this would be a little slower than rumours are suggesting for Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors.

AMD will be utilising its Zen 4 microarchitecture which is expected to be officially announced in 2021 with an aim for availability come 2022. It should see a transition to a new silicon fabrication process which is expected to be TSMC 5nm-class with all-important DDR5 memory support across enterprise and desktop platforms with LPDDR5 backing things up on mobile platforms. 

Besides DDR5, that should also mean PCI-Express gen 5.0 support too which is expected to lead to great things for enterprise in particular. Bandwidth doubling should be a key benefit for the likes of servers, datacentres, and supercomputers, although don't expect it to be as big a deal for home setups. PCIe 4.0 will be sufficient for a long time to come for most users. 

It's expected that we'll also see USB4 support too if the internal AMD roadmap is anything to go by, which no doubt will include faster speeds and increased bandwidth. It's likely that USB4 is a variant of Thunderbolt 3 so expect a speed of 40Gbps as well as charging support and DP signal transmission.

The report also suggests that Zen 4 processors won't be the only ones supporting DDR5 with Zen3+ APUs expected to feature it, as well as laptop chips. 

Whatever supports DDR5, expect to see memory speeds as high as 8,400Mbps (8,400MHz) with a single DIMM able to reach 128GB with reduced power consumption. Of course, we'll also see some DDR5 DIMMs running at 3,200MHz which sounds rather less remarkable when you eye up DDR4 but it's early days, after all. When it comes to memory density, expect to see DIMMs as high as 64GB compared to DDR4's limit of 16GB. 

For now, these truly are early days given AMD isn't expected to even fully announce these plans until next year, but it's interesting to see what the future should bring. We're not counting on DDR5 being fully mainstream by 2022, especially when it comes to the faster speeds, but at least we know where things are heading.