SK Hynix unveils GDDR6 memory – released with new graphics cards in early 2018

When the memory technology HBM was introduced, many saw it only as a matter of time before it would completely replace traditional GDDR. Now, however, it is clear that the duo will live side by side for the foreseeable future, where HBM is the more expensive but at the same time more high-performance and energy-efficient alternative.

In connection with the launch of the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080, GDDR5X was introduced, a further development of GDDR5 with higher bandwidth. The industry is now working on the regular sequel GDDR6, which will handle even higher speeds and be paired with the next generation of graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.

Micron and Samsung have previously announced that GDDR6 will be ready by 2018. Now SK Hynix joins the chorus and announces what is said to be the world’s fastest GDDR6. It is an 8 Gb (1 GB) circuit with a speed of 16 Gbps or an effective clock frequency of 16,000 MHz.

With a 384-bit memory bus, which has been synonymous with all Nvidia Titan, SK Hynix GDDR6 provides a bandwidth of 768 GB / s. With a narrower memory bus and a more common memory bus of 256 bits, it would provide a bandwidth of 512 GB / s. This can be compared to 320 GB / s and 356 GB / s for the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 with 8 GB GDDR5X in 10,000 and 11,000 MHz respectively.

SK Hynix has been planning to mass produce the product for a client to release high-end graphics card by early 2018 equipped with high performance GDDR6 DRAMs.

Extra interesting is that SK Hynix plans to mass-produce GDDR6 to meet the demand from a client who will release a high-performance graphics card in early 2018. This is in line with Micron, which has previously claimed that they accelerate the rollout of GDDR6 for the same reason.

From Nvidia’s side, GDDR6 is relevant for the architecture Volta, which succeeds Pascal, while from AMD it may be about the upcoming Vega or the successor Navi.