Samsung starts production of 8GB-hbm2 with increased data rate of 2.4Gbit/s
Samsung has started production of a new generation of 8GB dram modules with hbm2 interface, called Aquabolt. The memory achieves a data rate of 2.4 Gbit/s, while the previous generation did not go further than 1.6 Gbit/s.
According to Samsung, Aquabolt achieves a total bandwidth of 307GB/s. That would be 9.6 times faster than the bandwidth that can be achieved with an 8Gbit gddr5 chip, which would not go beyond 32GB/s. Compared to the 8GB-hbm2 modules of the previous generation, Aquabolt delivers a performance improvement of up to fifty percent due to the data rate of 2.4 Gbit/s.
To achieve the increased throughput, Samsung has improved the design of the applied through silicon via technology. Each of the eight stacked hbm2-dies is equipped with more than five thousand tsv channels and this high number can lead to reduced performance due to clock skew, according to Samsung. Samsung says it has minimized this effect. With TSV technology, the interconnects run like tunnels through the various silicon slices of the stacked chips, which results in speed gains.
In addition, the manufacturer says it has improved temperature control by increasing the number of thermal bumps between the hbm2-dies. In addition, Samsung has applied a new protective layer, which improves the overall sturdiness of the 8GB packages.
Samsung’s 8GB hbm2 modules consist of eight stacked hbm2 dies, each with a capacity of 8Gb, and at the bottom of the stack is a buffer die. Each layer is equipped with more than five thousand TSV channels, bringing the total number to more than forty thousand for an 8GB package.
Nvidia and AMD, among others, use hbm2 in high-end video cards. Nvidia first used hbm2 on its Tesla P100 cards in 2016 and also applies it to the Tesla V100 introduced in May 2017, but in both cases it concerns modules of 4 GB. AMD used first-generation hbm memory on its Fury cards and applies hbm2 to its Radeon Vega Edition.
Samsung says it will deliver Aquabolt to its customers at a stable rate, responding to the growing demand for high-performance hbm2 dram. Last year, the company announced that it would increase production of 8GB-hbm2 modules of the previous generation.