Windows 11 will soon stop measuring RAM memory in MHz

Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will no longer measure RAM memory performance in megahertz (MHz) and will adopt “mega transfers per second” (MT/s). This is an industry trend to standardize MT/s as a more accurate unit of measurement consistent with DDR memories.

The change was adopted in the system update released to Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3570 (KB5037008) starting May 3. This update will reach all OS users who are subscribed to the Insider program and have the “Download updates as they become available” option.

The new unit of measurement will be displayed in Task Manager and will not affect the performance or availability of the computer. The amount of RAM remains unchanged.

Why switch from MHz to MT/s?

Megahertz (MHz) is a unit used to measure frequency. It is used to determine the speed at which data moves within and between components. This unit made sense for measuring the speed of SDRAM memories, which were introduced in the late 1990s and whose data transfer rate is synchronized with the motherboard frequency.

In the early 2000s, a new technology called DDR (double data rate) was introduced for RAM memories. This memory technology doubled the number of data transfers per clock cycle.

Therefore, DDR SDRAM memories now have twice the data transfer capacity per clock cycle than SDRAM memories, even while maintaining the same frequency.

The problem is that the industry continues to use MHz to determine the speed of DDR memories, doubling the frequency value (nominally), which is technically not correct in practice.

The MT/s standard, which is more meaningful for such measurements, has only begun to be adopted in recent years. MT/s is an abbreviation for mega (or million) transfers per second and indicates the data transfer rate of RAM memory, regardless of frequency in MHz.