Samsung have announced a 2GB GDDR6 chip capable of matching SK Hynix’s 16Gbps silicon. The Samsung version is already winning awards, offering double the memory density of their Korean GDDR6 rivals.
Faster, bigger, better graphics memory is vital for our high resolution future, and you’re going to need one of the best gaming monitors to take advantage of it.
The Consumer Electronics Show is still a couple of months away from filling Las Vegas with turkey-stuffed tech nerds, and yet Samsung are already celebrating winning a CES 2018 Innovation Award for their GDDR6. How innovative.
The 16Gb GDDR6 memory die is able to hit the same 16Gbps speeds as the 8Gb chips that SK Hynix announced in April, which will mean memory bandwidth levels of up to 768GB/s on the same sort of 384-bit aggregated memory bus used in the Nvidia Titan X and Titan Xp.
The current GDDR5X VRAM used in those cards at the moment is only capable of producing 480GB/s and 548GB/s respectively.
The 2,048-bit bus used in conjunction with the AMD RX Vega’s HBM2 memory is able to provide just under 484GB/s of memory bandwidth, so future implementations of the HBM2 with GPUs are going to have to get a bit of a boost to match the upcoming GDDR6 performance.
It looks like there’s going to be a three-way scrap for video memory bragging rights next year, with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all fighting for a place in the next-generation of consumer graphics cards. The first two have already hit 16Gbps with GDDR6, while Micron has even managed that feat with GDDR5Xso I doubt they’ll be off the pace with their own version of the next-gen mem.