Samsung and SK Hynix are about to launch GDDR7 video memory, starting a new revolution in graphics card technology

Technology giants Samsung and SK Hynix recently announced that they will publicly display their latest GDDR7 video memory technology for the first time at the upcoming ISSCC 2024 International Solid State Circuit Conference on February 20. Although there are certain differences in the technical specifications of the two companies, they both hope to lead the new trend of next-generation graphics memory technology through this demonstration.

The highlight of GDDR7 video memory technology is its excellent speed and power consumption. It is reported that this technology uses PAM3 and NRZ signal modulation mechanisms, allowing GDDR7 to achieve significant performance improvements while maintaining similar power consumption to GDDR6/6X. Specifically, Samsung's GDDR7 memory frequency is as high as 37GHz, while SK Hynix's reaches 35.4GHz. Compared with the current mainstream Micron GDDR6X 19-24GHz on the market, this progress can be described as a qualitative leap. This breakthrough improvement will bring higher bandwidth and faster data transfer speeds to future graphics processing and high-performance computing fields, thereby improving the overall performance of the system.

According to the editor’s understanding, the bandwidth performance of GDDR7 at high frequencies is very good. Taking the 37GHz frequency as an example, even with a 256-bit bit width, GDDR7 can provide a bandwidth of up to 1.18TB/s, which has exceeded the 24GHz GDDR6 with a 384-bit bit width. If the bit width is increased to 384-bit and the frequency is reduced to 32GHz, the bandwidth of GDDR7 can still be close to 1.8TB/s, which is 80% higher than RTX 4090 and almost twice that of RX 7900 XTX. This shows that GDDR7 has obvious bandwidth advantages at high frequencies and is expected to become an important technology in the field of graphics processing in the future.

According to reports, Micron plans to be the first to launch GDDR7 products in the first half of this year, which will give it a competitive advantage in market layout. Although Samsung and SK Hynix have not announced specific timetables, they are also expected to launch GDDR7 products within this year to respond to Micron's competition. In terms of graphics card applications, NVIDIA's Blackwell RTX 50 series is expected to be the first graphics card to use GDDR7 technology. Different from this, AMD's RDNA4 RX 8000 series may not be eager to adopt GDDR7 technology for the time being due to cost considerations, especially on flagship products. Such market dynamics will further promote the development and competition of graphics card technology.

The above is the detailed content of Samsung and SK Hynix are about to launch GDDR7 video memory, starting a new revolution in graphics card technology. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!