Hopefully having a platform dedicated to DDR5 will help refine the architecture a bit. I'm sure a large chunk of the die space is dedicated to DDR4 (it'd have to be proportionately larger since it also has to know what kind of memory to use).

schmidtbag:

I'm sure a large chunk of the die space is dedicated to DDR4 (it'd have to be proportionately larger since it also has to know what kind of memory to use).

not likely the case, ddr4 and ddr5 are very similar , apart from the change in arrangement to 2x32 channels per dimm, increase in bank groups and moving voltage regulation to the dimms themselves, some small changes to signalling, there isnt a lot,most of the changes are not imc related. i would say the bulk of the changes to the imc that allow higher memory speeds actually happened before ddr5, with rocket lake and ryzen 3000 respectively, given that intel had ddr3+ddr4 on die from skylake all the way through cometlake despite not actually supporting ddr3 officially on later chips at all, its probably not that important.

It makes sense by performance standpoint. Alder and Raptor lake performed worse when paired with ddr4 its time to move on.