GDDR7 memory, or Graphics Double Data Rate memory, is a critical component in high-performance devices, especially in the graphics and artificial intelligence sectors. The latest development in this technology is the GDDR7 chip, which was first announced by Samsung at its Tech Day 2022. Although at first there were few specific details, since then more information has appeared about the promising new memory standard.
At the five-day international conference IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference 2024, which will be held in February, GDDR7 will be presented as part of the High-Density Memory and Interfaces session. There is not much information at the moment, other than the topic of the talk in the previous program: “A 16Gb 37 Gb/s GDDR7 DRAM with PAM3-Optimized TRX Equalization and ZQ Calibration).”
The GDDR7 memory will use PAM3 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation-3) signals to achieve data transfer speeds of up to 37 Gbps. The evolution of this memory included an increase in the data transfer rate without significantly increasing the internal clock frequency of the memory cells. This allowed each version of GDDR to increase the frequency of the memory bus, thereby increasing performance.
However, as increasing frequency becomes an increasingly difficult task, the industry is exploring other solutions. For example, GDDR6X replaced the traditional NRZ encoding with PAM4 encoding, effectively doubling the data transfer rate. Thanks to the reduced data rate, PAM4 also significantly reduces signal loss.
GDDR7, however, will use PAM3 encoding, a compromise between PAM4 and NRZ. This provides a higher data rate per cycle than NRZ. GDDR7 promises better performance than GDDR6 and lower power consumption and implementation cost than GDDR6X. In addition, GDDR7 offers ways to optimize memory efficiency and power consumption, which include four different read clock modes, allowing it to work only when needed. GDDR7 memory subsystems can also issue two independent commands in parallel, optimizing power consumption.
Samsung’s latest GDDR7 memory is expected to become available alongside the next generation of GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, most likely later this year.
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