Published in Graphics

Samsung starts mass production of 16Gb GDDR6 chips

by on18 January 2018


Based on 10nm-class manufacturing process

Samsung has announced that it has started mass production of 16Gb GDDR6 memory chips, offering twice the speed and density levels compared to currently available GDDR5 memory chips.

Aimed to be used with next-generation graphics cards and other systems, like automotive, network, and AI, the newly announced mass produced Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 chips are based on 10nm-class manufacturing process technology and will hit 18Gbps pin speed with data transfers of 72 GBps.

These 2GB (16Gb) chips operate at 1.35V, which is 35 percent lower compared to the widely-used GDDR5 chips running at 1.55V. Samsung claims that the 10nm-class 16Gb GDDR6 brings about a 30 percent higher manufacturing productivity compared to the 20nm 8Gb GDDR5 chips.

Compared to current 11Gbps/11.4Gbps GDDR5 chips on some graphics cards, like the Nvidia Titan Xp, the new chips would bring significant improvement in total bandwidth, raising it from around 550 GB/s on a 384-bit memory interface to 864 GB/s.

Although Samsung did not reveal when these chips will be available, since it has started the mass production, we will probably see them on graphics cards soon. Samsung was also keen to note that its extensive lineup, which includes the new 18Gbps 16Gb GDDR6 and the recently introduced 2.4Gbps 8GB HBM2 chips, it expects to "dramatically accelerate growth of premium memory market over the next several years".

 

Last modified on 18 January 2018
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