Samsung expands its GDDR6 portfolio with a new module capable of 24 Gbps data transfer per pin. It is primarily intended for high-performance graphics cards and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, but the company will also release low-power variants for other applications.
Samsung has announced the industry’s first GDDR6 RAM with this bandwidth, which will be used in next-gen graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, as well as laptops, game consoles and artificial intelligence accelerators for data centers.
The Korean tech giant says it has already started internal testing of the new 16GB memory chips, and its customers will begin their testing later this month. Also, commercial availability will be tied to future GPU releases, so we’ll soon see 24Gb/s GDDR6 in new products.
One of the obvious benefits of this new GDDR6 module is that it can deliver 30% faster speeds compared to Samsung’s previous 18Gbps module. In other words, a fully featured premium graphics card will be able to provide memory bandwidth of up to 1.1 Tbit/s, which is equivalent to transferring 275 1080p movies in one second.
Unlike GDDR6X, which was developed by Micron in collaboration with Nvidia, Samsung’s new GDDR6 DRAM is fully compliant with JEDEC specifications. It is also expected to be less energy-intensive due to the use of high-k metal shutter technology. This also means that it will offer lower clock speeds than GDDR6X, but, at the same time, better performance and will be cheaper to manufacture.
Speaking of manufacturing, Samsung is creating a new line of GDDR6 on a 10nm (1z) node. And while the company is primarily targeting GPUs and AI accelerators with the new technology, it will also release 20Gbps and 16Gbps variants for low-power applications. To do so, Samsung also uses dynamic voltage switching technology that can adjust the voltage from 1.1V to 1.35V to increase energy efficiency by 20% when needed.
Samsung believes the high-performance graphics market will see healthy double-digit growth in the coming years. The company wants a big piece of this ever-growing pie, so it’s making every effort to beat TSMC in the race to develop advanced chip manufacturing technologies.
Last month the company started the production of chips using the 3 nm process at its facilities in Hwaseong. Whether that will be enough to interest the likes of Nvidia remains to be seen, but Samsung remains the world leader in DRAM with a market share of nearly 44%.
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