Samsung preping smartphone memory with 8X wider bandwidth

Samsung late Sunday said it had developed a new type of mobile memory with ultra-wide bandwidth for smartphones and tablets. The LPDDR2 (Low Power Double Data Rate 2) RAM increases the bandwidth simply by increasing the number of pins on the chip 16 times larger from 32 to 512. The effect gives it eight times higher memory performance compared to regular mobile DDR memory, from just 1.6GB per second to 12.8GB, and is still four times wider than everyday LPDDR2.

Even with the greater headroom, the improvement will have reduced the power consumption by 87 percent, Samsung said.

The advancement will first come in a one-gigabit (128MB) chip made on a 50 nanometer process. Samsung hasn't said how soon this will ship, but its long-term plans will see a 20 nanometer, four-gigabit (512MB) version of the same wide bandwidth technology arriving sometime in 2013. Traditional memory modules are already being made in 30 nanometer methods and suggest Samsung could have the new memory ready quickly.

Customers likewise haven't been named apart from Samsung itself, although Apple is one of the largest single customers of mobile memory for the iPad, iPhone and iPod.