Rumor: Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 and AMD Radeon RX 8000 GPUs get GDDR7 vram
Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 50 graphics cards and AMD’s RDNA 4 counterparts may get GDDR7 memory. Chinese tech website MyDrivers reports this. Cadence recently announced that it has released verification tools for GDDR7 memory.
MyDrivers writes that GDDR7 vram will make its debut with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series, also notes TechPowerUp. Those GPUs would appear at the earliest by the end of 2024, the Chinese tech website claims. AMD’s competing Radeon RX 8000 series might also offer GDDR7 memory. This would allow the video cards to offer memory bandwidths of 36Gbit/s per pin, which equates to 1.15TB/s with a 256bit memory bus.
The GDDR7 specification has not yet been formalized by standards organization Jedec, although work is already underway on such memory. Cadence, a company that makes software and hardware for chip design, recently announced as the first manufacturer verification solutions for GDDR7 memory. With this, companies can already test GDDR7 memory for their products. The tools can simulate all new features in the GDDR7 specification, according to Cadence.
The semiconductor company confirmed that GDDR7 uses pam3 encoding for data transfer, among other things. This is 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. Cadence states that pam3 therefore offers a significantly higher data rate compared to pam2, while the signal-to-noise ratio is better than pam4. Furthermore, GDDR7 will include four different read clock modes, which manufacturers can use to adjust and optimize power consumption.
Samsung said in October that it was already working on GDDR7 and shared similar details about the memory standard. That company also said GDDR7 would support pam3 and also reported that the standard can offer throughputs of up to 36Gbit/s per pin. As an illustration, the GDDR6 specification officially offers bandwidths of 16Gbit/s per pin, although GDDR6 and GDDR6X chips with speeds of up to 24Gbit/s are now also available.