Micron will release GDDR7 memory for next-gen video cards in the first half of 2024

Micron will introduce its first GDDR7 memory chips in the first half of next year. This memory standard has been mentioned for some time, but is not yet ready for use. GDDR7 is expected to be used in the next generation of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

Micron reports in the presentation of its quarterly figures that the company will introduce its GDDR7 products next year. It does this on its 1-Beta node, the memory maker’s last process that still uses duv lithography. In the future, Micron will switch to EUV lithography machines.

The manufacturer does not yet share expected specifications of its GDDR7 chips. Samsung previously talked about its future GDDR7 memory. That company mentioned a bandwidth of 36Gbit/s per pin. With GDDR6, the maximum is still 16Gbit/s, although GDDR6 and GDDR6X chips with speeds of up to 24Gbit/s are now also available.

Cadence, a company that makes software and hardware for chip design, previously announced verification solutions for GDDR7 memory, with the company already sharing some memory type specifications. For example, GDDR7 uses pam3 encryption for data transfer. That’s in contrast to using pam2 encoding from GDDR6 or pam4 in GDDR6X. With pam3, three voltage levels are used for the transmission of the signal. This makes it possible to send more bits per clock cycle without having to increase the clock speed.

According to previous rumors, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series and AMD’s Radeon RX 8000 GPUs, among others, use GDDR7 memory. However, that has not yet been confirmed. Moreover, no release date has yet been announced for either series, although an Nvidia roadmap recently mentioned that the successor to Nvidia’s current Lovelace GPU architecture will be released in 2025.