Qimonda AG on Wednesday unveiled its new GDDR3 memory chips that offer yet unseen combination of clock-speed and capacity. The new chips are suitable for mobile graphics accelerators that need a sufficient amount of high-speed memory, but have space constraints. In addition, they can power high-end consumer or professional graphics cards.

The new addition to Qimonda GDDR3’s portfolio is 1Gb (128MB) chip that can operate at 2.0GHz, a rather exotic combination for GDDR3 type of memory. The new chips can be installed on a new-generation mobile graphics accelerators to provide 512MB of high-speed memory for chips that feature 128-bit bus or even 1GB of memory for chips that have 256-bit memory controller.

Theoretically, the new 1Gb/2GHz GDDR3 memory chips may be used to create 1GB graphics cards with 256-bit memory bus or even 2GB add-in cards with 512-bit memory bus width. If installed on a modern Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra graphics card, twelve of new GDDR3 chips would provide 1.5GB frame-buffer.

In addition to 1Gb/2GHz chip, Qimonda also ships 256Mb/2GHz components as well as 512Mb/2.40GHz GDDR3 memory chips.

Over the coming years – starting in 2008 – GDDR3 will be step by step succeeded by GDDR5, first in enthusiast and performance graphics applications, Qimonda indicated. According to Mercury Research, the GDDR5 will gain 7% of the GDDR market in 2008 and increase to 44% in 2009. GDDR5 is ideally suited to succeed GDDR3 in next generation game consoles as well. Qimonda is well prepared to support this upcoming I/O transition in the graphics market by planning to sample first GDDR5 devices by the end of calendar year 2007, the company said.