Samsung releases 16GB hbm2e memory chip

Samsung has made its Flashbolt memory chip available. It concerns high bandwidth memory with a capacity of 16 Gbit per die. Samsung stacks eight layers for a capacity of 16GB. The chip was already announced last year.

Now that the chip is available, manufacturers can integrate the memory into hardware. Hbm is mainly used on video cards, nowadays almost exclusively on GPUs for data centers. For example, Nvidia uses hbm2 with its Tesla V100 and AMD does the same with certain Radeon Pro Vega accelerators. Manufacturers can combine several of the 16GB chips for a large amount of vram.

Samsung already presented the hbm2e module in March last year. The manufacturer has now announced that volume production will start in the first half of this year. Samsung also continues to supply its Aquabolt chip, the new Flashbolt variant is an addition to the range.

In October last year, Samsung also announced that it would make hbm2 chips with twelve layers. With a capacity of 16Gbit per die, that would yield 24GB modules. It is not yet known when those modules will be released.