Samsung said on Thursday that it is making a new GDDR6 (graphics double data rate) DRAM with a 24 Gbps (gigabits per second) data transfer rate.
Samsung said the DRAM was made up of 16Gb chips manufactured on its third-generation 10nm process node, which also uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. On the DRAM, the company also used high-k metal gates, which are metals other than silicon dioxide that are used to make the gate hold more charge.
According to Samsung, this allows its latest DRAM to operate at a rate that is more than 30% faster than its 18Gbps GGDR6 DRAM predecessor. The DRAM adheres to the most recent GDDR6 DRAM standards established by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC)—the global standard-setting body for memory chips—allowing AI and graphics accelerator vendors to easily adapt it for their products, according to the company.
Samsung also said that it had used dynamic voltage switching to improve the power efficiency of DRAM by lowering its working voltage from 1.35V to as low as 1.1V. This makes notebook batteries last longer. The company stated that it will begin testing the DRAM with a major GPU customer for their next-generation system this month.
The high-performance graphic DRAM market is expected to grow by double digits each year, according to Samsung, who expects its new chip to be used in PCs, notebooks, and game consoles, as well as high-performance computing, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles.
According to Daniel Lee, Executive Vice President of Samsung Electronics’ Memory Product Planning Team,
“A premium graphics card with the chips will support a data processing rate of up to 1.1 terabytes (TB), which is equivalent to processing 275 movies in Full HD resolution within a second.”
