Micron Told Hot Chips That HBM Burns 3x the Wafer Area of DDR5 and the Ratio Will Not Improve

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In an August 23 Hot Chips 2026 talk, Micron HBM Design Architecture Fellow Raghu Sreeramaneni said HBM needs roughly three times the wafer area of DDR5 for the same capacity, and when asked whether newer generations would close the gap said it definitely would not get better. An HBM4 die runs 256 memory banks against DDR5's 32, and the overhead comes from data paths, power delivery and through-silicon vias. HBM will consume 23% of total DRAM wafer output in 2026, up from about 19%, which is the mechanism behind every consumer memory price story this year.