Samsung joins Qimonda and Hynix in the GDDR5 race

Tuesday 04th December 2007, 01:45:00 PM, written by Arun

Samsung has announced the company's first GDDR5 chip, and while its capacity only reaches 512Mbit, its effective memory clock reaches an astonishing 6GHz (versus 2.4GHz for the GDDR4 on the Radeon HD3870). This news comes 2 weeks after Hynix's announcement, and one month after Qimonda's.

Data

• Samsung claims 6GHz for its highest-end GDDR5, while Hynix and Qimonda both claim 5GHz. Samples from all three manufacturers have been shipping since last month.
• Hynix is using a 66nm process, while Samsung is on a slightly more advanced 60nm process. Qimonda looks to be on 75nm, but will presumably transition to 58nm sooner rather than later.
• Power consumption is claimed to be 20% lower than GDDR3 by Samsung. We presume this means 1GHz+ GDDR3, so it's still higher than low-end GDDR4 but beats it awesomely in perf/watt.
• Mass production is expected to start in the first half of 2008 for both Samsung and Hynix, while Qimonda didn't mention it but the company is expected to ramp up production in early 2008.

Analysis

• Based on the above timeframes, the first GPUs based on GDDR5 could possibly be released in late Q2 or Q3. Of course, that also depends on NVIDIA and AMD's roadmaps, and whether that makes sense in their current plans.
• With GDDR5's levels of bandwidth, you really want to aim at the ultra-high-end even with a 256-bit memory bus.
• And in that market, 512MiB of memory just won't be enough - so you'd need 16 chips with 512Mbit memory, which is more expensive. Thus, 1Gbit chips might have an advantage in the market.
• Larrabee, which is slated for early production in 2009, is also widely expected to use GDDR5. The bus width is currently unknown, however.

With this kind of bandwidth, we can expect to see GPUs with more than twice the overall performance of the current highest-end products within less than a year. After a slow year during which NVIDIA's G80 remained the world's fastest GPU, things look like they're about to heat up big time.

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