Week overview
Hynix - GDDR5 memory for graphics chips from mid 2008
(heise online, 16.11.2007 14:33) Hot on the heels of Qimonda, Hynix has now announced its first GDDR5 memory chip. It should be being used on graphics cards from around mid 2008.
Two weeks after Qimonda , Korean memory chip manufacturer Hynix has also announced its first GDDR5 SDRAM chip. Whilst Qimonda has announced a 512 Mbit version, Hynix is jumping straight to 1 Gbit. According to Hynix, a 66 nanometre production process will be used. Mass production will start in the first half of 2008.
In contrast to Qimonda, which plans to skip GDDR4 technology, Hynix is also planning to offer 512 Mbit chips meeting the GDDR4 specification.
Samsung is also working on a GDDR5 chip - which, according to old presentation slides, should have already been announced. Samsung is planning to mass produce 1 Gbit GDDR5 chips using 50 nm technology from mid 2008.
With a speed of 2.5 GHz, GDDR5 delivers around 5 Gbits of data per pin per second adding up to around 20 Gbytes per component for standard x32 chips. So with eight parallel 2.5 GHz GDDR5 chips, graphics processors with 256 data lines for connecting to the memory achieve a speed of 160 Gbytes/s. For comparison, the memory controller in current x86 processors and chipsets for desktop PC motherboards typically control two 64 bit memory channels. Where PC2-6400/DDR2-800 DIMMs are used, the theoretical maximum data transfer rate is 12.8 Gbytes/s or with two PC3-10600/DDR3-1333 memory channels 21 Gbytes/s. Rambus promises that their XDR2 chips will achieve at least 16 Gbytes/s per chip.
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