Rambus claims first Gen4 DDR5 RCD

Rambus Inc. has announced the availability of the industry’s first Gen4 DDR5 registering clock driver (RCD). The Gen4 DDR5 RCD enables a 50% increase in memory bandwidth and increases the data rate to 7200 MT/s from the first-generation 4800 MT/s DDR5 module solutions, enabling a new level of main memory performance for data-center servers, according to the company.

(Source: Rambus Inc.)

The improvements meet the requirements for advanced data-center server and generative AI workloads. “With memory being an essential enabler of server performance, the need for greater memory bandwidth continues its meteoric rise driven by demanding workloads like generative AI,” said Sean Fan, chief operating officer at Rambus, in a statement.

The DDR5 RCD provides command/address (CA) and clocks to the DDR5 memory devices in RDIMMs. The device supports the double data rate (DDR) and single data rate (SDR) CA bus and two independent subchannels per RDIMM. It provides clock rates up to 3600 MHz and supports data rates up to 7200 MT/S. Other features include low power 1.1-V VDD operation, four clocks per subchannel and a 12.5 MHz (max) I3C bus interface.

The company’s DDR5 memory interface chips provide key components of server systems, including the RCD, serial presence detect (SPD) hub and temperature sensors. These devices target advanced data-center applications such as hyperscale data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), high-capacity storage systems, big data and real-time analytics.

The Rambus 7200 MT/s DDR5 RCD is available now. Sampling to the major DDR5 memory module (RDIMM) manufacturers started in the fourth quarter of 2023.