Samsung is now mass producing new higher density GDDR6 memory built on its 10nm-class process technology that it claims offers twice the speed and density of its previous 20nm GDDR5. Samsung's new GDDR6 memory uses 16 Gb dies (2 GB) featuring pin speeds of 18 Gbps (gigabits-per-second) and is able to hit data transfer speeds of up to 72 GB/s per chip.

According to Samsnug, its new GDDR6 uses a new circuit design which allows it to run on a mere 1.35 volts. Also good news for Samsung and for memory supply (and thus pricing and availability of products) is that the company is seeing a 30% gain in manufacturing productivity cranking out its 16Gb GDDR6 versus its 20nm GDDR5. 

Running at 18 Gbps, the new GDDR6 offers up quite a bit of bandwidth and will allow for graphics cards with much higher amounts of VRAM. Per package, Samsung's 16Gb GDDR6 offers 72 GB/s which is twice the density, pin speed, and bandwidth than that of its 8Gb GDDR5 running at 8Gbps and 1.5V with data transfers of 32 GB/s. (Note that SK Hynix has announced it plans to produce 9Gbps and 10Gbps dies which max out at 40 GB/s.) GDDR5X gets closer to this mark, and in theory is able to hit up to 16 Gbps per pin and 64 GB/s per die, but so far the G5X used in real world products has been much slower (the Titan XP runs at 11.4 Gbps for example). The Titan XP runs 12 8Gb (1GB) dies at 11.4 Gbps on a 384-bit memory bus for maximum memory bandwidth of 547 GB/s. Moving to GDDR6 would enable that same graphics card to have 24 GB of memory (with the same number of dies) with up to 864 GB/s of bandwidth which is approaching High Bandwidth Memory levels of performance (though it still falls short of newer HBM2 and in practice the graphics card would likely be more conservative on the memory speeds). Still, it's an impressive jump in memory performance that widens the gap between GDDR6 and GDDR5X. I am curious how the GPU memory market will shake out in 2018 and 2019 with GDDR5, GDDR5X, GDDR6, HBM, HBM2, and HBM3 all being readily available for use in graphics cards and where each memory type will land especially on the mid-range and high-end consumer cards (HBM2/3 still holds the performance crown and is ideal for the HPC market).

Samsung is aiming its new 18Gbps 16Gb memory at high performance graphics cards, game consoles, vehicles, and networking devices. Stay tuned for more information on GDDR6 as it develops!

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