Micron is working on 16Gbit GDDR6X memory chips with 24Gbit/s speeds

Hardware manufacturer Micron says it has started mass production of 16Gbit GDDR6x memory chips at 21Gbit/s. Those chips are for the recently released GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Micron is also working on GDDR6X chips with speeds of up to 24Gbit/s.

That writes Micron in a news item to investors. Micron has been working on the 16Gbit version of its memory chips for some time. The new 16Gbit GDDR6X chips are now being scaled up to ship with the RTX 3090 Ti, which was already released at the end of March. These chips still run at speeds of 21Gbit/s, where the previous GDDR6X modules offered speeds of up to 19.5Gbit/s.

Micron also says that there are plans for GDDR6X memory chips that can reach speeds of 24 Gbit/s. These are intended for ‘the data-hungry applications of the future’. Perhaps the chips will also be used in the next generation of Nvidia cards, although that is not confirmed. An earlier rumor states that Nvidia’s RTX 40 series supports configurations of up to 24GB of GDDR6X memory. Nvidia worked closely with Micron on development from GDDR6Xwhich is used exclusively in Nvidia products to date.

With the 16Gbit memory, Micron promises 15 percent better performance compared to the previous 8Gbit modules in the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti, and of course twice as much capacity. Micron also emphasizes that the memory chips use pam4 technology for signal transmission, which promises to be more efficient than regular signal transmission technology and should deliver 20W of energy savings.

Earlier we wrote that the RTX 3090 Ti has 24GB GDDR6X memory with 21Gbit/s modules. In combination with a 384-bit memory bus, this results in a total memory bandwidth of 1008GB/s, compared to the 936GB/s of the current RTX 3090. Partly due to that faster memory, the tdp of the RTX 3090 Ti has been increased to 450W. That is 100W higher than its predecessor.