Micron has confirmed that they plan to commence mass production of the GDDR6 memory chips in early 2018. The latest memory products will deliver increased speeds for faster graphics DRAM performance.
Micron Announces GDDR6 Mass Production in Early 2018 - Achieves 16 Gbps Speeds on G5X
Micron's announcement for GDDR6 doesn't comes as a surprise as GPU makers are readying to support even faster memory standards. NVIDIA is already on board with Micron and uses their high-performance GDDR5X chips on enthusiast grade cards. The mass production of GDDR6 in early 2018 confirms that we will be looking at future GPU architectures embracing the memory standard.
As for GDDR6, Micron has stated that the new memory standard will continue down the path of the successful G5X memory. While the new memory technology would be very similar to GDDR5X, there are a few differences of which the major ones include:
- The introduction of an FBGA180 ball package with increased pitch
- A dual channel architecture
With regards to the status of Micron’s G6 program, which we first announced in February, I am pleased to report that our product development efforts are on-track and we expect to have functional silicon very soon. By leveraging our G5X based high speed signaling experience from roughly 2 years of design, mass production, test and application knowledge, I am confident we are well positioned to bring the industry’s most robust G6 to mass production by early 2018. via Micron
Micron announced their GDDR6 program, which was first announced in February 2016, would be under full mass production in early 2018. SK Hynix also announced that they plan to commence GDDR6 mass production in early 2018 so overall, there seems to be a good indication that supply would be good as several vendors will be offering the new memory chips for graphics processing units.
Micron GDDR6 Memory Specifications - 16Gb Dies With Up To 16 Gbps Transfer Rates
So coming to the specifications, GDDR6 will come in 8Gb and 16Gb densities while the standard followed by JEDEC allows for up to 32Gb dies. The 8Gb DRAM dies will allow for up to 8 GB VRAM on a 256-bit wide card and 12 GB VRAM along a 384-bit wide card. The 16Gb dies will essentially double the VRAM since each chip will feature 2 GB VRAM. A 384-bit bus card could feature up to 24 GB while dies with 32Gb density will deliver 48 GB VRAM along the same interface.
Looking at the speeds, we are seeing an incredible jump from 12 Gbps (GDDR5X) to 16 Gbps (GDDR6). The NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Xp packs the most bandwidth on any consumer GPU to date with a total amount of 547.7 GB/s using 11.4 Gbps GDDR5X chips. The first generation GDDR5X chips were ran at 10 Gbps on the GTX 1080 which was recently upgraded to even faster 11 Gbps G5X chips.
Coming to GDDR5X, Micron is currently offering the fastest GDDR based memory chips for graphics cards in the industry. Their GDDR5X memory are available at speeds of up to 12 Gbps. That's faster than the 10 Gbps chips they introduced on the GTX 1080 a year earlier. But they aren't stopping at it as officially confirmed, the Micron team at Munich has achieved 16Gbps data rates in their high speed test environment.
I am excited to announce that our Graphics design team in Munich has achieved 16Gbps data rates in our high speed test environment—another first for memory industry. The left picture shows the data eye opening at 16Gbps based on a critical PRBS pattern sequence, with great timing and voltage margin. The right image below shows stable data timing margin (horizontally) versus data rate (vertically), from our base sort speed of 10Gbps up to an unprecedented 16Gbps. This result is based on measurements on a meaningful sampling size of our mass production G5X silicon – not theoretical simulation data.
We strongly believe that our expertise and experience running ultra-high data rates on G5X is going to be a big advantage for driving performance in GDDR6. via Micron
Micron has definitely achieved an impressive feat in the industry. The latest GDDR5X memory is just an example of the kinds of benefits we are going to see from future technologies like GDDR6 which launches early 2018 in products such as NVIDIA's GeForce class graphics cards based on the Volta architecture.
