Why you should care about the new tech

There’s a brand new phone in town, and with it brand new hardware that most people haven’t heard about. Aside from impressive cameras and flagship processors, Xiaomi’s new Mi 10 flagship and Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra use a new kind of memory: LPDDR5.

You’ll be seeing that particular tech term thrown around a lot as companies start announcing their flagship smartphones, so we’ll be explaining what it is.

LPDDR5, in a nutshell, is the latest version of low-power memory that’s used in smartphones today. It comes right after LPDDR4x which is what most higher-end flagships came with in 2019.

Compared to RAM in PCs and notebooks, RAM for smartphones is much more compact and is more expensive to make. They also consume less power (thus the LP designation).

If you look at the last generation of memory VS the new memory tech, LPDDR5 is 50% faster – which should make for faster access speeds all around.

What’s even more important for the tech is that it uses less power than the previous generation, consuming around 30% less energy. More efficiency means longer battery life.

You’ll probably not be seeing LPDDR5 on mainstream devices soon – Samsung and Micron are only starting to produce it, and the chip is expensive right now to put on phones.