The future looks big, as in literally "big." As companies create bigger screen displays for TVs, tablets and smartphones, Samsung hops in with a plan to mass produce 12 Gigabit LPDDR4 RAM chips that would make it possible to create smartphones with RAM of 6 Gigabytes in the future.
The new 12Gb LPDDR4 RAM chips are said to deliver a faster performance by up to 30 percent compared to the current 8Gb chips. They are also expected to be more power efficient as they promise to consume power by up to 20 percent less.
According to Samsung, the new chips will use the same 20 nm process. Its previous manufacturing only yielded 8 Gigabit LPDDR4 RAM chips or an equivalent of 1GB. Then they combined the 1GB chips in mixes of either two or four to come up with 2 to 4GB of RAM.
One gigabyte (GB) holds 8 gigabits (Gb) which means that 12Gb is equivalent to 1.5GB. In other words, a gigabit is smaller than a gigabyte. To make it less confusing, just remember that Gigabit would sound like "tidbit." In print however, it's easier to see the difference. The smaller Gigabit carries a smaller "b" (Gb) while the bigger Gigabyte carries a bigger "b" (GB).
Samsung had so far been able to produce 12Gb memory chips using the same 20 nm process, which is quite an achievement for the company. If four of these chips are combined, it means that it can easily achieve as much as 6GB of RAM without the need to change anything else because of the chips' compatibility with the existing 20 nm memory.
The biggest RAM found in smartphones these days reaches up to 4GB. These include devices such as the Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 Edge Plus, ASUS ZenFone 2, Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, Lenovo K80 and OnePlus 2.
Interestingly, Samsung is reportedly the main chip producer for the next iPhone flagships which would most likely be the A9. Pairing the A9 processor with the smartphone's 2GB of RAM would be enough to gain enhanced power and speed as compared to the current iPhone 6.
It remains to be seen whether future devices from Apple will join the 4GB RAM bandwagon. However, Samsung has already started mass producing the 12Gb LPDDR4 RAM chips, which means that it's only a matter of time for consumers to get their hands on the next generation of handsets that include 6GB RAM on their specs sheet.
