Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest maker of dynamic random access memory, said Thursday that throughout 2004 it supplied 15 million of high-speed DRAMs for graphics cards. Being the only mass supplier of commercial GDDR3 products, Samsung has shipped virtually 100% of all GDDR3 chips shipped.

Samsung’s 256Mbit (8M x32) GDDR3 chips offer clock-speeds ranging from 1000MHz to 1400MHz, up to 56% higher than typical GDDR. In addition, the GDDR3 chips require a 1.8V voltage supply, much lower than DDR’s 2.5V supply, resulting in a more-than-acceptable level of power consumption to accompany their significantly higher performance.

Samsung Electronics currently supplies 256Mb GDDR3 chips commercially for high-end and mainstream graphics cards with 128MB, 256MB or 512MB of onboard memory that use visual processing units from ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp.. Later during the year the firm is expected to ship 512Mb GDDR3 chips for consumer graphics cards with 512MB onboard.

Each graphics card usually has 4 to 8 GDDR3 memory chips onboard.

Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor also introduced their GDDR3 products in 2003, however, none of graphics cards X-bit labs has tested used GDDR3 memory chips from Hynix or Micron.