Samsung and SK Hynix will soon demonstrate faster GDDR7 VRAM for new GPUs

Samsung and SK Hynix will demonstrate new, faster GDDR7 VRAM in February. Samsung shows GDDR7 memory with bandwidths of 37Gbit/s per pin, while SK hynix shows more economical GDDR7 vram with a bandwidth of 35.4Gbit/s. Samsung previously developed 32Gbit/s-GDDR7.

Samsung and SK hynix are both holding their demonstrations during the ISSCC 2024 scholarshipLike this also noted Tom’s Hardware. This fair will take place from February 18 to 22 in San Francisco. Samsung talks about GDDR7 chips with a capacity of 16Gbit, which amounts to 2GB per module. These chips must also have a bandwidth of 37Gbit/s per pin. To illustrate: GDDR6 and GDDR6X memory currently achieves bandwidths of up to 24Gbit/s per pin.

SK hynix will show next month GDDR7 memory optimized for lower power consumption, possibly for use in devices such as laptops. These memory chips must achieve lower bandwidths, of 35.4 Gbit/s per pin, with the same capacity of 2 GB per module. The precise power consumption of the SK hynix memory is not mentioned in the ISSCC planning.

The GDDR7 specification was previously announced. The memory type makes the switch to PAM3 encryption for data transfer, among other things. 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.

Samsung previously announced its first GDDR7 chips for release sometime this year, although the manufacturer then spoke of speeds of up to 32Gbit/s per pin. Micron also previously said it was developing GDDR7 VRAM and then spoke of a release in the first half of 2024. According to rumors, both AMD and Nvidia will use the new memory type in their next generations of video cards.