Thursday, February 22nd 2007
Samsung Touts 4GHz Memory for Graphics Cards
Samsung Touts 4 GHz Memory for Graphics Cards
Getting more speed is always nice - and Samsung is about to break the speed barrier yet again, pushing GDDR4 chips to 4 GHz and beyond. At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Samsung presented its new GDDR4 memory chips that operate at about 40% higher speed than GDDR4 was initially estimated to, but use more power.
4 GHz GDDR4 memory chips are only "available" in 512 MB capacities and were manufactured using 80 nm process technology. They were designed for a power supply voltage of 1.4 V - 2.1 V, reports PC Watch web-site. The data rate of 4 Gb/s (4 gigabit per second, or 4 GHz) was achieved with devices operating at 2.0 V, which is higher than Samsung's current-generation GDDR4 chips that can function at up to 1.9 V officially.
GDDR4 memory at 4.0 GHz delivers bandwidth of 16 GB/s and if such chips were used in today's graphics cards that have 256-bit memory bus, this would result in peak data bandwidth of 128 GB/s, two times more than the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX (the only graphics card on the market that uses GDDR4) can offer. For tomorrow's graphics boards that will have 512-bit memory access Samsung's new chips would give peak memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s, which is nearly three times more than 86.4 GB/s that the currently highest-performance graphics card - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - has.
Are we beginning to enter the era when GPU memory will be clocked many times higher than our CPUs?
Getting more speed is always nice - and Samsung is about to break the speed barrier yet again, pushing GDDR4 chips to 4 GHz and beyond. At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Samsung presented its new GDDR4 memory chips that operate at about 40% higher speed than GDDR4 was initially estimated to, but use more power.
4 GHz GDDR4 memory chips are only "available" in 512 MB capacities and were manufactured using 80 nm process technology. They were designed for a power supply voltage of 1.4 V - 2.1 V, reports PC Watch web-site. The data rate of 4 Gb/s (4 gigabit per second, or 4 GHz) was achieved with devices operating at 2.0 V, which is higher than Samsung's current-generation GDDR4 chips that can function at up to 1.9 V officially.
GDDR4 memory at 4.0 GHz delivers bandwidth of 16 GB/s and if such chips were used in today's graphics cards that have 256-bit memory bus, this would result in peak data bandwidth of 128 GB/s, two times more than the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX (the only graphics card on the market that uses GDDR4) can offer. For tomorrow's graphics boards that will have 512-bit memory access Samsung's new chips would give peak memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s, which is nearly three times more than 86.4 GB/s that the currently highest-performance graphics card - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - has.
Are we beginning to enter the era when GPU memory will be clocked many times higher than our CPUs?
13 Comments on Samsung Touts 4GHz Memory for Graphics Cards
That would be niceeeeee..
2./ 4GHz GDDR bandwidth 128MB/s
Therefore
- The new memory has twice the bandwidth, or
- The new memory has 100% more bandwidth
(not "two times more"... which would mean 192MB/s)yep 1ghz+100% = 2ghz (ddr 4ghz)
though im bettin there are many significant trimming differences between the 2 chips in question therefore probably not a true 100% increase (could be less or maybe even more) we are just discussing theoretics here :)
EITHER WAY this stuff is twice the speed of what we have now. percentage comparisons suck anyway.