It is likely that DDR4 memory will need a few more months of advantage to start its advance over desktop systems, but the main manufacturers have already activated all their mass production resources. That is the case of Samsung, which presented a new 128-gigabyte DDR4 module. No, it's not a typo: 128 gigabytes, sixteen times more than the average RAM in a current computer.
It has been many years since that historic barrier limited us to 640 kilobytes of memory in our computers. Today we can get systems with several gigabytes of RAM, but despite its relatively low cost, memory is never enough. Besides increasing the available amount, there is also the need to increase bandwidth, and that's where DDR4 memory comes in. The theoretical maximum of a DDR4 module is said to be 512 gigabytes, four times more than what a manufacturer could place in a DDR3 module. Half a terabyte of RAM in a single module would be something out of a science fiction movie... if it weren't for the fact that Samsung already has one with 128 gigabytes..
Indeed, the South Korean giant began general production of a DDR4 memory with 128 gigabytes. This is the next phase in its TSV (Through-Silicon Via) design, in which it combines a total of 144 DDR4 chips with a 20-nanometer design, distributed in 36 packages of 4 GB each. With the application of TSV technology, Samsung not only manages to double the performance of this memory to 2,400 megabits per second, but also reduces energy consumption by 50 percent, a critical factor for the enterprise environment and the servers that will surely receive this hardware.
Naturally, Samsung hasn't said anything yet about its price, but I imagine it will be at a level unreachable for general consumers. Anyway, it's just a matter of time. Each of the previous RAM generations started its evolution along the same path. If we consider that there are servers with 96 DIMM slots... we'd be talking about 12 terabytes of RAM. Any virtualized system should fly on that memory...
