X-bit labs

Samsung Mass Produces 1.60GHz GDDR3 Memory Chips.

Category: Memory

by Anton Shilov

[ 02/13/2004 | 09:03 PM ]

Samsung Electronics announced mass production of the industry’s highest speed monolithic memory device, a Graphics Double Data Rate 3 (GDDR3) capable of achieving clock speeds of up to 800MHz.

“Our 8Mx32 GDDR3 provides customers with the fastest graphics memory on the planet at lower power consumption than existing graphics systems,” said Mueez Deen, director of marketing for DRAM and Graphic memory products at Samsung Semiconductor

The GDDR3 256Mb graphics memory devices manufactured by Samsung are clocked at 500MHz, 600MHz, 700MHz and 800MHz speeds effectively providing 1000Mb/s, 1200Mb/s, 1400Mb/s and 1600Mb/s per pin bandwidth. Such memory will enable high speed 256MB and 512MB graphics cards as well as power efficient 128MB notebook solutions.

To allow speeds beyond 1.0GHz Samsung used a number of technologies developed for DDR-II and GDDR2 memories, such as On-Die Termination (ODT), Output Driver Strength adjustment by EMRS, Calibrated output drive, Pseudo Open drain compatible inputs/outputs and some other.

Samsung’s GDDR3 memory chips are packaged in 144-ball FBGA package and require 1.9V power supply for device operation and 1.9V power supply for I/O interface.

“It is a lower cost, lower power and faster alternative to equivalent density stacked solutions today,” the representative for Samsung said.

“With the aid of high-speed memory technology such as Samsung’s new GDDR3 graphics memory, NVIDIA will continue to advance graphics technology at an incredible pace so game developers have the freedom to stretch the limits of the cinematic computing experience,” an NVIDIA’s spokesperson said.

In mid-September we reported that Samsung supplied a batch of its high-speed 1.60GHz memory chips to NVIDIA Corporation for NV40 testing purposes. Peak theoretical bandwidth of 1600MHz memory on 256-bit bus is mind-blowing 51.2GB/s, therefore, in case NVIDIA’s next-generation high-end GPUs work with such memory, there will be a major performance improvement over current generation of high-performance graphics cards.