Question DDR5 a flop ?

[Digital~Dreams]

I opted for 3200 (3600Mhz) DDR4 ram and board as DDR5 seemed to achieve very little in real world tests. Months have passed and the situ seems the same !?, yes higher clock rates but also higher CL leading to little value over DDR4.

Or I am missing something ?

 

[jeremyj_83]

I opted for 3200 (3600Mhz) DDR4 ram and board as DDR5 seemed to achieve very little in real world tests. Months have passed and the situ seems the same !?, yes higher clock rates but also higher CL leading to little value over DDR4.

Or I am missing something ?

Higher CL but higher clocks result in the same overall latency. That said we have needed the additional bandwidth offered by DDR5 to feed CPU cores. If you look at benchmarks for Intel systems on DDR4 and DDR5 you see that the DDR5 platforms have higher performance.

 

[Eximo]

DDR4 3000 CL 15 = DDR5 6000 CL30
DDR4 3200 CL 16 = DDR5 6400 CL36

And those now fall into the easily affordable category. When they were 200% the price of DDR4 they made little sense.

Regardless, you gain the bandwidth. Which isn't super helpful to many games, but many work related tasks benefit. Also get simple ECC.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The reason why DDR5 doesn't seem to provide much more performance today is because DDR5 isn't here to service CPUs of today. It's here to service CPUs of tomorrow.

The primary reason for the bandwidth increase is to feed more cores as mentioned. You can do this by either increasing the transfer rate (as what each generation of RAM gives us), or by increasing the number of channels the memory controller has (which isn't viable for consumers). And even then, the performance of those cores matter, since the more you can process something, the more data you'll probably churn around.

So while today's CPUs may not be able to make the most of DDR5 now, what DDR5 can provide will give us headroom so when tomorrow's CPUs that can make use of that bandwidth comes around, DDR5 will be a mature technology. And then we'll just move onto the next generation shortly after.

 

[tennis2]

There's also burst length (2x), banks (2x), and two 32-bit channels instead of one 64-bit channel. These are smaller in effect compared to the bandwidth explained above, but still improve performance/efficiency.