Hynix has announced what for the moment is the fastest GDDR5 memory on the market with data speeds of up to 7Gbps, which is 2Gbps more than the previously fastest GDDR5 memory chips which offer data speeds of 5Gbps.

How much of an impact this will have for AMD, as so far Nvidia has yet to launch a GDDR5-based graphics card, is hard to say, but the extra bandwidth should allow for faster cards based on the current architecture.

Hynix will offer 1Gbit chips (128MB) which means that a 512MB graphics card will only need four chips, which is ideal for something like the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 as it means the memory chips take up less PCB space.

The downside is that volume production won't kick off until sometime during the first half of next year, which is a very open time frame, to say the least. By then we might also see some new GPUs that will take full advantage of these faster memory chips.

You can find the press release here