Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced memory technology, today held its annual Memory Tech Day, showcasing industry-first innovations and new memory products to accelerate technological advancements across future applications—including the cloud, edge devices and automotive vehicles.

Attended by about 600 customers, partners and industry experts, the event served as a platform for Samsung executives to expand on the company's vision for "Memory Reimagined," covering long-term plans to continue its memory technology leadership, outlook on market trends and sustainability goals. The company also presented new product innovations such as the HBM3E Shinebolt, LPDDR5X CAMM2 and Detachable AutoSSD.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced it has extended its industry-leading 1β (1-beta) process node technology with the introduction of 16Gb DDR5 memory. With demonstrated in-system functionality at speeds up to 7,200 MT/s, Micron's 1β DDR5 DRAM is now shipping to all data center and PC customers. Micron's 1β-based DDR5 memory with advanced high-k CMOS device technology, 4-phase clocking and clock-sync provides up to a 50% performance uplift and 33% improvement in performance per watt over the previous generation.

As CPU core counts increase to meet the demands of data center workloads, the need for higher memory bandwidth and capacities grows significantly to overcome the 'memory wall' challenge while optimizing the total cost of ownership for customers. Micron's 1β DDR5 DRAM allows computational capabilities to scale with higher performance enabling applications like artificial intelligence (AI) training and inference, generative AI, data analytics, and in-memory databases (IMDB) across data center and client platforms. The new 1β DDR5 DRAM product line offers current module densities in speeds ranging from 4,800 MT/s up to 7,200 MT/s for use in data center and client applications.

"Navi 4C" is a future high-end GPU from AMD that will likely not see the light of day, as the company is pivoting away from the high-end GPU segment with its next RDNA4 generation. For AMD to continue investing in the development of this GPU, the gaming graphics card segment should have posted better sales, especially in the high-end, which it didn't. Moore's Law is Dead scored details of what could have been a fascinating technological endeavor for AMD, in building a highly disaggregated GPU.

AMD's current "Navi 31" GPU sees a disaggregation of the main logic components of the GPU that benefit from the latest 5 nm foundry node to be located in a central Graphics Compute Die; surrounded by up to six little chiplets built on the older 6 nm foundry node, which contain segments of the GPU's Infinity Cache memory, and its memory interface—hence the name memory cache die. With "Navi 4C," AMD had intended to further disaggregate the GPU, identifying even more components on the GCD that can be spun out into chiplets; as well as breaking up the shader engines themselves into smaller self-contained chiplets (smaller dies == greater yields and lower foundry costs).

During yesterday's HBM3 Gen2 memory products yesterday, Micron also shared an updated roadmap with select media and partners. The most interesting details on that roadmap were updates to DRAM and GDDR memory products, with increases in capacity coming for both types of memory. Micron is aiming to launch 32 Gbit or 4 GB DDR5 memory ICs somewhere in the beginning of 2024, which means we can look forward to 32 GB single sided DIMMs with a single DRAM die per memory IC. This should, in theory at least, enable cheaper 32 GB DIMMs, but as always, it's unlikely that the cost saving will be passed on to the end customer. As far as server customers goes, Micron is planning 128 GB DIMMs for 2024, followed by 192 GB DIMMs in 2025 and 256 GB DIMMs in 2026.

When it comes to GDDR, Micron will be launching JEDEC standard GDDR7 memory with 16 and 24 Gbit dies, or 2 and 3 GB capacity, the latter could be the highest capacity GDDR7 memory IC on the market and could see some interesting graphics card configurations. Micron is promising speeds of up to 32 Gbps per pin or 128 GB/s per chip, which is a big jump up from its current best GDDR6X memory which tops out at 24 Gbps per pin or 96 GB/s per chip. GDDR7 differs from Micron's proprietary GDDR6X by using PAM-3 rather than PAM-4 signalling, although this is simply something that the likes of AMD and NVIDIA would have to design their GPUs around. Micron doesn't appear to have any plans for GDDR7X at this point in time. The company is also working on several new iterations of HBM memory over the coming years, with the company expecting to hit 2 TB/s sometime in 2026 or later.

Samsung on Wednesday announced mass-production of the world's first next-generation GDDR7 memory chips, and Ryan Smith from AnandTech scored a few technical details from the company. Apparently, the company's first production version of GDDR7 memory is built on the same D1z silicon foundry node as its 24 Gbps GDDR6 memory chip—the fastest GDDR6 chip in production. D1z is a 10 nm class foundry node that utilizes EUV lithography.

Smith also scored some electrical specs. The first-gen GDDR7 memory chip offers a data-rate of 32 Gbps at a DRAM voltage of 1.2 V, compared to the 1.35 V that some of the higher speed GDDR6 chips operate at. While the pJpb (pico-Joules per bit) is 7% higher than the current generation in absolute terms, for the 32 Gbps data-rate on offer, it is 20% lower compared to that of the 24 Gbps GDDR6 chip. Put simply, GDDR7 is 20% more energy efficient. Smith remarks that this energy-efficiency gain is purely architectural, and isn't a from any refinements to the D1z node. GDDR7 uses PAM3 signaling compared to the NRZ signaling of conventional GDDR6, and the PAM4 signalling of the GDDR6X non-JEDEC standard that NVIDIA co-developed with Micron Technology.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that it has completed development of the industry's first Graphics Double Data Rate 7 (GDDR7) DRAM. It will first be installed in next-generation systems of key customers for verification this year, driving future growth of the graphics market and further consolidating Samsung's technological leadership in the field.

Following Samsung's development of the industry's first 24 Gbps GDDR6 DRAM in 2022, the company's 16-gigabit (Gb) GDDR7 offering will deliver the industry's highest speed yet. Innovations in integrated circuit (IC) design and packaging provide added stability despite high-speed operations. "Our GDDR7 DRAM will help elevate user experiences in areas that require outstanding graphics performance, such as workstations, PCs and game consoles, and is expected to expand into future applications such as AI, high-performance computing (HPC) and automotive vehicles," said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. "The next-generation graphics DRAM will be brought to market in line with industry demand and we plan on continuing our leadership in the space."

Last week Micron Technology CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, announced during an investors meeting that the company's next generation GPU memory—GDDR7—will be arriving next year: "In graphics, industry analysts continue to expect graphics' TAM compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to outpace the broader market, supported by applications across client and data center. We expect customer inventories to normalize in calendar Q3. We plan to introduce our next-generation G7 product on our industry-leading 1ß node in the first half of calendar year 2024." His proposed launch window seems to align with information gleaned from previous reports—with NVIDIA and AMD lined up to fit GDDR7 SGRAM onto their next-gen mainstream GPUs, although Team Green could be delaying their Ada Lovelace successor into 2025.

Micron already counts these big players as key clients for its current GDDR6 and GDDR6X video memory offerings, but Samsung could be vying for some of that action with its own GDDR7 technology (as announced late last year). Presentation material indicated that Samsung is anticipating data transfer rates in the range of 36 Gbps, with usage of PAM3 signalling. Cadence has also confirmed similar numbers for its (industry first) GDDR7 verification solution, but the different encoding standard will require revising of memory controllers and physical interfaces.

With Samsung Electronics announcing that the next-generation GDDR7 memory standard is in development, and Cadence, a vital IP provider for DRAM PHY, EDA software, and validation tools announcing its latest validation solution, the decks are clear for the new memory standard to debut with the next-generation of GPUs. GDDR7 would succeed GDDR6, which had debuted in 2018, and has been around for nearly 5 years now. GDDR6 launched with speeds of 14 Gbps, and its derivatives are now in production with speeds as high as 24 Gbps. It provided a generational doubling in speeds from the preceding GDDR5.

The new GDDR7 promises the same, with its starting speeds said to be as high as 36 Gbps, going beyond the 50 Gbps mark in its lifecycle. A MyDrivers report says that NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50-series, probably slated for a late-2024 debut, as well as AMD's competing RDNA4 graphics architecture, could introduce GDDR7 at its starting speeds of 36 Gbps. A GPU with a 256-bit wide GDDR7 interface would enjoy 1.15 TB/s of bandwidth, and one with 384-bit would have a cool 1.7 TB/s to play with. We still don't know what is the codename of NVIDIA's next graphics architecture, it could be any of the ones NVIDIA hasn't used from the image below.

Cadence, a leading developer of tools for system design and verification, has announced the industry's first GDDR7 verification solution. This in-depth software solution affords IC designers the ability to simulate and verify their GDDR7 silicon designs before printing a single chip. The challenges of designing GDDR7 stem from a rather massive leap in operating speed and advanced features, with GDDR7 targeting speeds of 36,000 MT/s and utilizing more advanced signaling methods.

The next-generation GDDR7 memory standard is shaping up nicely, to double bandwidth and density over the current GDDR6. In a company presentation detailing upcoming memory technologies, Samsung revealed that GDDR7 uses PAM3 signalling. While ones and zeroes are stored in DRAM memory cells, it is transmitted between devices (such as the DRAM chip and the GPU) in electrical waveforms known as "signals." Ones and zeroes are interpreted by patterns in the signal waveform.

Conventional GDDR6 memory uses NRZ (non-return to zero) or PAM2 signalling to achieve data-rates starting from 14 Gbps, with 24 Gbps expected to be the fastest production GDDR6 memory speed on offer, however some of the faster GDDR6 speeds such as 18 Gbps, 20 Gbps, and 22 Gbps couldn't hit production soon enough for the development phase of the GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPU, and so NVIDIA and Micron Technology co-developed the GDDR6X standard leveraging PAM4 signalling, to offer speeds ranging between 18 Gbps to 23 Gbps (or higher) several quarters ahead of this faster JEDEC-standard GDDR6.

During Samsung's Tech Day 2021, the company presented some interesting insights about the future of system memory technologies and how it plans to execute its production. Starting with the latest DDR5 standard, the company intends to follow JEDEC documents and offer some overclocking modules that surpass the specification advised by JEDEC. While the DDR5 standard specifies memory modules with 6,400 MT/s, Samsung will develop modules capable of overclocking up to 8,400 MT/s. These are not yet confirmed as they are still in the development phase. However, we can expect to see them in the later life of DDR5 memory.

The company also talked about the DDR6 standard, which is supposedly twice as fast as DDR5. The new DDR6 standard is still in early development, and all we know so far is that the number of memory channels per module is seeing a twofold increase over DDR5 to four channels. The number of memory banks also increases to 64. In addition to DDR6 for desktop and server use cases, the company is also working on Low Power DDR6 (LPDDR6) for mobile applications. While the company's LPDDR5 memory goes into volume production using the 1a-nm process at the beginning of 2022, the LPDDR6 is still in early development. The base speed for DDR6 modules will allegedly arrive at 12,800 MT/s, while overclocking modules will join the party at up to 17,000 MT/s. Mobile-oriented LPDDR6 version is also supposed to come with up to 17,000 MT/s speeds.