Microsoft is planning on making a pretty big change to the Windows Task Manager in the near future. Memory speeds will no longer be reported in MHz but in MT/s, for mega transfers per second. The move follows an industry-wide trend to change how memory speeds are reported to provide end users with a more accurate representation of a given memory stick's transfer speeds.
Microsoft announced the change on its Windows blog in a post about changes in the current Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3570. This build, which is only available to Insiders with access to the Beta channel, features the change described as follows: "Updated the units (from MHz to MT/s) for DDR speed." This move has been a long time coming, as Double Data Rate memory (DDR) offers two data transfers per cycle instead of just one with Single Data Rate memory (SDRAM), which was the type of memory in common use when MHz became the standard way to refer to a memory's speed.
As Guru3D notes, memory labeled as DDR5-6000MHz runs at 3000MHz, so using 6000 MT/s is more accurate. Even though DDR memory can deliver twice the transfer rate per clock cycle compared with SDRAM, manufacturers never changed how memory speed was reported as they figured it would only confuse customers. Now that it's 2024, the industry is shifting to MT/s for DDR memory, and Microsoft is finally following suit.
This is good news for consumers, but there will be a transition period as not everyone is on board yet. We browsed some online retailers and saw a mixture of MHz and MT/s being displayed for DDR5 memory sticks, so there needs to be some corporate training in retail channels. However, now that DDR5 has begun to proliferate and DDR4 will be officially jettisoned from new desktop platforms when Intel launches Arrow Lake later this year, we anticipate the transition to MT/s will be complete by 2025.
