SK Hynix Inc. today introduced the world's fastest 2Znm 8Gb (Gigabit) GDDR6 (Graphics DDR6) DRAM. The product operates with an I/O data rate of 16 Gbps (Gigabits per second) per pin, which is the industry's fastest. With a forthcoming high-end graphics card of 384-bit I/Os, this DRAM processes up to 768 GB/s (Gigabytes of graphics data per second). SK Hynix has been planning to mass produce the product for a client to release high-end graphics card by early 2018 equipped with high performance GDDR6 DRAMs.

GDDR is specialized DRAM for processing an extensive amount of graphics data quickly according to what graphics cards command in PCs, workstations, video players and high performance gaming machines. Especially, GDDR6 is a next generation graphics solution under development of standards at JEDEC, which runs twice as fast as GDDR5 having 10% lower operation voltage. As a result, it is expected to speedily substitute for GDDR5 and GDDR5X. SK Hynix has been collaborating with a core graphics chipset client to timely mass produce the GDDR6 for the upcoming market demands.

After finally reaching mature yields (comparable to those of planar NAND processes), Micron's 32-layer first generation 3D NAND has grown increasingly prominent in the company's NAND output. Now, the company is looking to ramp-up production of their (currently sampling) 64-layer 3D NAND, promising "meaningful output" by the end of December 2017, looking for an 80% increase in total GB per wafer and a 30% decrease in production costs.

When it comes to the graphics subsystem memory, Micron is looking to transition their 20nm production to a "1x nm" (most likely 16nm) node, in a bid to improve cost per GB by around $20, with introduction of 16nm GDDR5 memory to be introduced later this year. However, GDDR5X volume is expected to grow significantly, in a bid to satisfy bandwidth-hungry uses through GPUs (like NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and potentially the upcoming 1080 Ti) and networking, with GDDR6 memory being introduced by the end of 2017 or early 2018. The company is still mum on actual consumer products based on their interpretation of the 3D XPoint products through their QuantX brand, though work is already under way on the second and third generation specifications of this memory, with Micron planning an hitherto unknown (in significance and product type) presence in the consumer market by the end of this year.

Even as its fellow-Korean DRAM maker SK Hynix is pushing for HBM3 to bring 2 TB/s memory bandwidths to graphics cards, Samsung is betting on relatively inexpensive standards that succeed existing ones. The company hopes to have GDDR6, the memory standard that succeeds GDDR5X, to arrive by 2018.

GDDR6 will serve up bandwidths of up to 16 Gbps, up from the 10 Gbps currently offered by GDDR5X. This should enable memory bandwidths of 512 GB/s over a 256-bit wide memory interface, and 768 GB/s over 384-bit. The biggest innovation with GDDR6 that sets it apart from GDDR5X is LP4X, a method with which the memory controller can more responsively keep voltages proportionate to clocks, and reduce power-draw by up to 20% over the previous standard.