What's CUDIMM Memory?

Note the marked IC in the middle of the memory module. With Arrow Lake, Intel is introducing support for CUDIMM DDR5 memory, which stands for "Clocked Unbuffered Dual Inline Memory Module." These DIMMs represent an advancement over standard DDR5 memory by incorporating a CKD (Clock Driver) chip directly on the memory modules. Instead of having to drive each memory chip individually, over a relatively long distance, the CPU can now send a signal to just the Clock Driver, which then drives the memory chips directly over a short distance, which helps with signal integrity, especially at high clock frequencies.


G.SKILL sent us their upcoming F5-8800C4255H24GX2-TZ5CK, a 2x 24 GB DDR5-8800 CUDIMM memory kit—very impressive. We will be using this in an upcoming Arrow Lake Memory Scaling article. For now, see below for some quick results.

Performance Scaling

To get a feel for performance improvements with faster memory, we ran some benchmarks using G.SKILL's CUDIMM DDR5-8800 memory kit with the Ultra 9 285K. Please note that this is a different test setup than our regular main test suite, so the results are not directly comparable, despite the same test names.