Qimonda AG, a leading supplier of advanced dynamic random access memory (DRAM), said on Thursday that it had shipped first samples of GDDR5 memory chips to its “customers”. The pilot production of GDDR5 now may be an indicator that the memory company is on-track to produce the new type of GDDR next year.

“We are pleased that we can support the GDDR5 activities of our customers with this first sample shipment, which is a major step to ensure the fast introduction of GDDR5 into the graphics market,” said Robert Feurle, vice president of business unit graphics at Qimonda.

The Munich, Germany-based memory manufacturer claims that GDDR5 is targeted to become the next predominant graphics DRAM standard and will boost memory bandwidth of graphics applications to a new dimension. The GDDR5 standard is about to get finalized in JEDEC where industry participants jointly defined this leading edge graphics standard over the last years.

GDDR5 will be available with data rates up to 20GB/s per component (5000MHz, or 5GHz, in case of a memory chip with 32-bit memory bus), which is more than double the bandwidth of the fastest GDDR3 and GDDR4 memories today and comes with a multitude of advanced power saving features.

GDDR5 is targeting a variety of applications, starting with high-performance desktop graphics cards followed by notebook graphics adapters. Later on GDDR5 may find home inside game consoles as well as inside other graphics intensive applications.

First products with GDDR5 memories are expected for 2008. Qimonda did not reveal who of the leading graphics chip designers – ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, Intel Corp. or Nvidia Corp. – got samples of GDDR5.