For its part, NVIDIA is abandoning SOCAMM, a proprietary memory system developed by the Chameleon. The company is now concentrating on the second generation of the standard, expected to offer improved bandwidth – bandwidth which systems like the Blackwell Ultra could well benefit from!
SOCAMM: NVIDIA moves on to the second generation of the standard!
Broadly speaking, SOCAMM is a memory system developed by NVIDIA on its own. It was a proprietary format proposed outside any consortium such as JEDEC. Well, NVIDIA is abandoning it in favor of the second generation. The aim is to improve it to take advantage of higher memory bandwidth, and to do so, we find a system that takes advantage of a large number of inputs/outputs, more than on other standards.
In fact, there are 694, compared with 260 for conventional DRAM or 644 for LPCAMM. This makes it possible to offer high bandwidths. For example, the first generation was rated at 14.3 TB/s, with memory running at 8533 MT/s. With the second version, we could reach 16 TB/s by switching to LPDDR5X at 9600 MT/s on systems like the Blackwell Ultra GB300 NVL72.
And therein lies the appeal: boosting the performance of NVIDIA systems. As you know, the brand specializes in the AI sector, which is capable of handling large volumes of data. To sustain performance, it’s important that memory keeps up! However, with this second generation of memory, the Chameleon is looking to standardize the format by having it endorsed by JEDEC.
With this second generation, NVIDIA could call on other suppliers, since only Micron supplied the Chameleon with the first generation. Now we’re talking about major players like Samsung and SK Hynix!