Micron denies rumors of GDDR6 memory

Earlier in December, there was a rumor that Micron is working on the successor to GDDR5 called GDDR6 for launch in 2016. The information received a lot of attention when they went against already confirmed reports that the memory giant’s big technology life next year is GDDR5X.

The new memory advancements coming from Micron in 2016 are going to be called GDDR5X, not GDDR6. GDDR5X and GDDR6 are not the same product and Micron has not announced any plans involving GDDR6.

Now Micron is taking the magazine from his mouth and denying the information about GDDR6, which should not be confused with GDDR5X which is a further development of the current GDDR5. The company also adds that there are currently no plans for a possible successor named GDDR6.

GDDR5X is intended to provide significant performance improvements to designs that are currently using GDDR5, therefore giving system designers the option of delivering enhanced performance without dramatically altering current architectures.

Furthermore, Micron states that GDDR5X is intended to deliver performance improvements for designers who are already adapted to GDDR5. Among other things, this gives Nvidia and AMD the opportunity to give their graphics cards higher memory bandwidth, without having to adapt their architectures to more advanced memory technologies such as HBM.

The big news with GDDR5X compared to GDDR5 is doubled prefetch from 32 to 64 bytes at each memory access. The result is doubled memory bandwidth at a given clock frequency. Initially, GDDR5X is expected to be available at speeds of 10, 12 and possibly also 14 Gbps, but in the long run it is 16 Gbps – double up from the maximum 8 Gbps offered by today’s GDDR5 memory.

A formal introduction of GDDR5X is expected to take place in 2016, the same year that AMD and Nvidia launch the Arctic Islands and Pascal architectures, respectively.