Your motherboard can’t handle Samsung’s chonky new 512GB RAM modules

To set the stage for servers that can store up to 100 petabytes in system memory, Samsung has created a world first: 512GB PCIe 5.01 DRAM module. Memory modules such as CXL, which are designed to allow for large amounts of memory to be packed into a system, are developed for this purpose.

The first PCIe 5.0-compliant memory device for data centre and enterprise server applications has been unveiled. Big data is clearly on the horizon for South Korea’s hardware behemoth. CXL memory modules aren’t new, but this generation’s memory capacity is four times greater and latency is a fifth lower than that of the previous generation.

The “tens of terabytes range” cannot be reached with regular DDR memory due to the limitations of the CXL memory interface, which allows for higher memory capacity scalability. To go along with the additional storage and bandwidth, CXL also raises the memory capacity to several terabytes per second. If you were planning on putting one of these bad boys in your gaming machine, I’m sorry to tell you that this DRAM is only for high-capacity enterprise servers and data centres.

According to a press release from Samsung, an increasing need for better and faster memory solutions has been attributed to the “development of the metaverse, AI, and big data.” While the UCIe group promotes the die-to-die Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express standard, Samsung is working to standardize CXL memory in order to lower prices and create new processor packages with impressive performance potential.

The first batch of Samsung’s 512GB CXL DRAM will be sent to clients and partners for “joint evaluation and testing” later this year. A toolset that will allow customers to integrate CXL memory into their existing systems without affecting their application environments will be updated by Samsung later this month. Your IT guy is executing a backflip someplace. “CXL DRAM is a significant turning point for future computing structures by greatly increasing artificial intelligence and big data services,” says Cheolmin Park, VP of memory at Samsung. Maybe in a future PCIe slot, we’ll all be installing large CXL memory modules next to our graphics cards.