SK Hynix plans to produce its 6th generation high-bandwidth memory chips (HBM4) using TSMC's 3 nm process, a change from initial plans to use the 5 nm technology. The Korea Economic Daily reports that these chips will be delivered to NVIDIA in the second half of 2025. NVIDIA's GPU products are currently based on 4 nm HBM chips. The HBM4 prototype chip launched in March by SK Hynix features vertical stacking on a 3 nm die., compared to a 5 nm base die, the new 3 nm-based HBM chip is expected to offer a 20-30% performance improvement. However, SK Hynix's general-purpose HBM4 and HBM4E chips will continue to use the 12 nm process in collaboration with TSMC.

While SK Hynix's fifth-generation HBM3E chips used its own base die technology, the company has chosen TSMC's 3 nm technology for HBM4. This decision is anticipated to significantly widen the performance gap with competitor Samsung Electronics, which plans to manufacture its HBM4 chips using the 4 nm process. SK hynix is currently leading the global HBM market with almost 50% of market share, most of its HBM products been delivered to NVIDIA.

As AI workloads continue to evolve and expand, memory bandwidth and capacity are increasingly critical for system performance. The latest GPUs in the industry need the highest performance high bandwidth memory (HBM), significant memory capacity, as well as improved power efficiency. Micron is at the forefront of memory innovation to meet these needs and is now shipping production-capable HBM3E 12-high to key industry partners for qualification across the AI ecosystem.

Micron's industry-leading HBM3E 12-high 36 GB delivers significantly lower power consumption than our competitors' 8-high 24 GB offerings, despite having 50% more DRAM capacity in the package
Micron HBM3E 12-high boasts an impressive 36 GB capacity, a 50% increase over current HBM3E 8-high offerings, allowing larger AI models like Llama 2 with 70 billion parameters to run on a single processor. This capacity increase allows faster time to insight by avoiding CPU offload and GPU-GPU communication delays. Micron HBM3E 12-high 36 GB delivers significantly lower power consumption than the competitors' HBM3E 8-high 24 GB solutions. Micron HBM3E 12-high 36 GB offers more than 1.2 terabytes per second (TB/s) of memory bandwidth at a pin speed greater than 9.2 gigabits per second (Gb/s). These combined advantages of Micron HBM3E offer maximum throughput with the lowest power consumption can ensure optimal outcomes for power-hungry data centers. Additionally, Micron HBM3E 12-high incorporates fully programmable MBIST that can run system representative traffic at full spec speed, providing improved test coverage for expedited validation and enabling faster time to market and enhancing system reliability.