Samsung Creates 32GB DDR3 Module

Regardless of how many laptops, mobile phones and other type of electronics and hardware it deals in, Samsung always seem to know when to show off its status as top semiconductor and, especially, memory maker. Lately, though, the company appears to have focused more on storage solutions, as is made evident by such product launches as the quite unusual 512GB SSD unveiled two weeks ago. Nevertheless, Samsung hasn't forgotten about the RAM market and has now unleashed a 'world's first' type of such a device.

What Samsung provided is the first memory module in history, at least the first load-reduced dual-inline memory module (LRDIMM), to feature a full 32GB of RAM. The part is meant to show up in servers and high-performance computing applications, particularly those that perform virtualization or cloud computing.

The DDR3 module is based on the 40nm manufacturing process technology and is composed of 72 DRAMs with capacity of 4GB each. The entire part operates on between 1.35V and 1.5V and has a clock speed of 1,333 MHz. This speed is already a step up from the 800MHz usually encountered in enterprise installations.

As for actual practical implementations, a server should be able to cram up to 384GB per CPU, which leads two-way server systems to 768GB, roughly 1.5 more than a 512GB server system with 32GB RDIMMS can achieve.

“In developing the industry's first load-reduced module with 40nm-class DDR3 technology, we are underscoring our determination to combine the best of capacity and performance for the newest generation of servers,” said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president, memory marketing, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics.

Samsung intends to start mass production of the 32GB LRDIMM DDR3 module sometime during the second half of the year. This will supposedly make it the owner of the largest family of DRAM offerings in the IT industry.