DRAM Die Timeline

How to read it

Each point is one DRAM die that a vendor release, datasheet or paper describes. It sits at the date of the earliest public source cited for that die, which is the date of the announcement or production news and not the date the die reached modules on shelves. The chart shows 88 dies from 87 public sources, and the JEDEC revisions cite 5 more. It is not every die ever made, and a die with no stated value for the chosen measure is left off. It runs from 1998 to 2026. The Type and Maker chips filter the chart and the tables below. Stacked HBM has its own timeline.

Data rate is the speed the shipping part was specified at, from a datasheet or a vendor release, in MT/s: a GDDR7 die at 32Gb/s per pin is 32,000MT/s. A paper's test chip can run faster than anything sold, so a rate printed only for a test chip is not shown. Data rate uses a log scale, because a graphics die runs several times faster than a DDR die of the same year. The dashed line is the fastest data rate any JEDEC DDR revision had defined by each date, so it applies to DDR main memory and not to LPDDR or GDDR.

Density is in gigabits per die and uses a log scale, where each gridline step multiplies the value rather than adding to it. Vendors name their process nodes differently, so the node class is in the tables as the vendor prints it and is not charted. A rate marked as up to is the top speed the vendor states for the part.

What it will not tell you

A die sits at the date of its release, not the date modules with it shipped in volume. Vendors do not all publish the same numbers, so a die with no stated speed is not on the data rate chart even when its density is known. Die area is published for few of these parts: it comes from TechInsights teardowns of shipping dies, and the bit density chart draws only dies with both a density and an area. For stacked DRAM on accelerators, see the HBM Timeline, and for the flash side, the NAND Die Timeline. ISSCC, IEDM and the VLSI Symposium, where device papers on these dies are published, are on the events calendar.