Yesterday was Memcon time again. Memcon is the event that Denali started as a one-day conference in Silicon Valley that is all about memory. After Cadence acquired Denali, Cadence now hosts the event.
Have you been looking for DDR4 datasheets? Here is a roundup of what’s available online from the memory vendors:
Samsung has posted their DDR4 product guide on their website, and it gives us excellent insight into the direction that Samsung plans to go with DDR4 in the next few months with a lot of data that wasn’t previously publicly available.
Since last week’s announcement of Intel CPUs supporting DDR4, the first almost-announcement of a DDR4 machine by a major PC manufacturer that I have found is the Alienware Area-51 (Alienware is a Dell subsidiary). I say almost-announcement because at the time of writing this blog, Alienware’s website didn’t include any details of when it will be available for sale, or how much it would cost, or anything like a press release on it. The machine will be capable of running up to three 4K monitors simultaneously and support up to 32GB of DDR4 memory running DDR4-2133.
As predicted in my earlier blog entry, today is the official launch of Intel’s products supporting DDR4.
JEDEC officially published the LPDDR4 standard today. It is very impressive how quickly LPDDR4 was standardized given the comparably long time it took for DDR4 from start to publication. That is primarily driven by the pace of the smartphone market and the need for increased memory bandwidth year over year which has far outpaced the memory bandwidth growth requirement in the “PC” SDRAM market. The JEDEC committees responsible for this latest publication should be very proud of their achievement. Most of the people on these committees have “regular day jobs” outside of JEDEC and the support from the various companies involved is also appreciated.
Following today’s event in Seoul, there are still two more JEDEC LPDDR4 Workshops and Mobile Forums coming up in the next few weeks.
There is a ton of internet speculation today – mostly based on a report on a Japanese website – that Intel will make it’s first DDR4-compatible products available on August 29th and that internet retailers may make those products available for sale the same day. Earlier speculation was that Intel would release the DDR4-compatible products in time for the Intel Developer Forum in mid-September.
It’s DAC time again and that means lots of EDA and IP related announcements.
Synopsys made an exciting announcement today launching our new IP accelerated initiative to help designers significantly reduce the time and effort of integrating IP into their SoCs. This initiative augments Synopsys’ broad portfolio of DesignWare® IP with the addition of new IP Prototyping Kits, IP Virtual Development Kits and customized IP subsystems to accelerate prototyping, software development and integration of IP into SoCs. With the IP Accelerated initiative, Synopsys goes beyond the traditional IP supplier paradigm, redefining what customers can expect from their IP providers to help them successfully integrate IP with less effort, lower risk and faster time-to-market.
Graham Allan
Graham Allan is the Sr. Product Marketing Manager for DDR PHYs at Synopsys. Graham graduated from Carleton University's Electrical Engineering program with a passion for electronics that landed him in the field of DRAM design at Mosaid in Ottawa, Canada. Beginning at the 64Kb capacity, Graham worked on DRAM designs through to the 256Mb generation. Starting in 1992, Graham was a key contributor to the JEDEC standards for SDRAM, DDR SDRAM and DDR3 SDRAM. Graham holds over 20 patents in the field of DRAM and memory design.