SK Hynix announces that it will start production of GDDR2018 memory in early 6

Robert Sole 1 May 2017

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SK Hynix has announced that in early 2018 they will begin to manufacture the first GDDR6 memory chips, which will arrive in capacities of up to 8GB per unit and a working frequency of 16GHz.

We were caught off guard by the announcement just made by Hynix, who has announced the first GDDR6 memory chips. These new DRAM units for graphics cards will have an individual capacity of 8GB and will work at 16GHz, which is much higher and more powerful than the current GDDR5 standard and even more than the GDDR5X developed by Micron. Hynix has announced that these GDDR6 memories will begin to be developed in early 2018 on a large scale.

GDDR5 memories for the past five years have been used in high-end graphics cards, from the summer of 2008 to the present. During its useful life, GDDR5 memory has almost tripled its initial speed, going from the initial 3.6GHz to the current 9GHz, in addition the capacity of each chip has been increased, going from 512Mb to 8GB. Currently we have, for example, the NVIDIA GTX 1060 and NVIDIA GTX 1080 using GDDR5 memories, but for the NVIDIA GTX 1080, Micron's GDDR5X memories have been used that have a working frequency of 12GHz, which arrived this past year. GDDR2018 memory is expected to arrive in 6 just over two years after the arrival of GDDR5X.

sk hynix

Hynix has not revealed excessive details about the new GDDR6 chips, but has said that they will arrive in 8GB stacks and a transfer speed of 16GHz, which will be manufactured with a 21nm process developed by Hynix. The company has commented that GDDR6 memories will have a working voltage 10% lower than GDDR5, although it is not discussed if it is with respect to the quiescent voltage of 1.35V, the standard voltage of 1.5V or the high frequency of 1.55V in GDDR5.

Possibly Hynix will provide some details to the graphics card manufacturers to make use of GDDR6 memory. Apparently, these memories will have a 384-bit bus and will be able to reach a total memory bandwidth of 768GB / s. Due to the required number of 384-bit subsystem chips, these graphics cards will likely have 12Gb of memory. It has not been revealed to whom Hynix is developing these memories, but it is logical to think that these memories will be used in high-end graphics cards.

Currently the GDDR5X is only from the Micron factory, but the GDDR6 standard will be developed by the three main DRAM manufacturers according to the forecasts, therefore the availability will be high.