Samsung Doubles SDRAM Speed With LPDDR3, Available in Smartphones This Year

Samsung  just announced its LPDDR3 SDRAM, the next-generation low-power-consumption mobile memory chip. The company states that this DRAM will be the mainstream memory used in smartphones later this year.
With Android phones getting more advanced, manufacturers are starting to push their user interface overlays further, requiring more memory in the process. This is why HTC’s latest Sense UI, for example, only runs on the company’s latest and greatest hardware.
Our current crop of smartphones and tablets use LP (Low Power) DDR2 SDRAM, which has a maximum data transmission rate of 3.2GB/sec for the entire chip. Samsung’s new LPDDR3 effectively doubles the transmission rate to 6.4GB/sec, all without increasing the power requirement. This equates to a chip that is twice as fast and more efficient. However, this seems to be only a step toward last year’s announcement of a 12.8GB/sec DRAM chip from Samsung.

With the increasing demands of high definition video and 3D gaming on mobile devices, the need for faster memory is growing. Battery technology is much slower to evolve, however, so being able to increase performance without impacting battery life is a real feat.
Let’s hope we start seeing devices with these chips sooner than later.