Samsung released its latest set of quarterly financials at the end of last week, and like many tech companies, it has been enjoying booming revenue and profits. Samsung's revenue reached a record in the most recent quarter at KRW63.67 trillion (US$72bn), a figure up 20 per cent YoY, while profits were up 34 per cent QoQ.
Often we get a juicy revelation in the post-results conference calls, and this was again the case with Samsung. From the Samsung investor call transcripts, WCCFTech noted that Samsung told investors that it had started to develop 24Gb DDR5 ICs. These ICs will enable Samsung and partners to roll out 768GB DIMMs.
At the time of writing the biggest DDR5 memory modules available, also from Samsung, are the 512GB DDR5 registered DIMM (RDIMM) memory modules, which use 32x 16GB stacks based on eight 16Gb DRAM devices. With 24Gb ICs on the way, this boosts the RDIMM max capacity to 768GB. Back in March, when Samsung talked about its 512GB DDR5 RDIMMs, it explained they were being prepared for next-gen servers, including servers based upon AMD Epyc 'Genoa' and Intel Xeon Scalable 'Sapphire Rapids' CPUs.
Samsung's 512GB DDR5 RDIMMs use 16Gb ICs and TSV technology
During the investor call, a Samsung exec said that the new even higher capacity DIMMs were being made at the request of "cloud companies". A server with eight memory channels, using two RDIMMs on each channel, could therefore come packing 12TB of DDR5 RAM, WCCFTech highlighted.
In some other Samsung semiconductor news, with its roots in the most recent financial statements and follow-up investor call, we hear that Samsung is going to be upping its foundry services prices. Despite record revenue and earnings, Samsung needs cash to strengthen its foundry expansion plans, says a report published by EENews Europe.
There wasn't a lot of detail given regarding the reasoning behind the foundry price increases, only that any extra income will be used to "support more investment in 5nm EUV process technology," according to the source.
