Samsung starts mass production of 4GB-hbm2 for video cards

Samsung has started the mass production of 4GB dram with hbm2 interface. Compared to the dram modules based on the first generation of high bandwidth memory, the bandwidth has been doubled to 256GB/s.

The 4GB dram packages based on hbm2 consist of four 8Gbit slices, which are stacked and each have five thousand through silicon via channels, and are thus vertically connected to each other. Samsung also wants to produce the first 8GB HBM2 modules this year. The Jedec organization declared hbm2 the standard last week. The standard increases the interface width to 1024bit, spread over eight independent channels per dram stack.

The bandwidth of JESD235A, as the hbm2 standard is officially called, is a maximum of 256GB/s and this is the bandwidth of Samsung’s new packages. The manufacturer emphasizes that the bandwidth is doubled with respect to hbm1 and is seven times higher than that of 4Gbit DDR5 chips. In addition, hbm2 doubles the bandwidth per watt compared to gddr5, claims Samsung.

Hbm2 is, among other things, intended for video card memory; AMD uses hbm1 with its Fury and Nano video cards. It is expected that both AMD and Nvidia will use hbm2. In addition, the memory can be used for high performance computing, workstations and servers. Compared to gddr5, hbm not only offers a higher bandwidth, but also advantages in terms of the space it takes up on a video card.