Samsung Electronics has given us a look at the future by talking about the upcoming release of GDDR7 memory. This will be an unprecedented change to the way we perceive performance from not only our computers, but data centers, servers, and mobile smartphones. If we already saw a great scale in the change from GDDR5 to GDDR6, this new jump has a lot more to say. Let’s dive deep into what information we have available.
Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business gave his keynotes about the new memory technology at the IEDM 2022 conference. Although he didn’t give us any date for us on when to expect this new technology, we know it won’t come out any time soon this year if we keep in consideration the fact that Nvidia and AMD had just released their new high-consumer-grade GPUs.
For now, all we have is the expectation of the South Korean company about how much will this new piece of technology improve graphics card accelerators. According to the company, they will keep working on developing this technology no matter what happens.
Compared to GDDR6X DRAM used in recently released GPUs, the company’s upcoming technology will feature PAM3 (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation) IO signaling, with improved performance. PAM3 IO signaling transmits data through digital signals, passing them via three levels: -1, 0, 1. In comparison. This last part improves over the current NRZ IO signaling that uses only two levels: 0 and 1.
How much better will GDDR7 be than GDDR6?
According to the Samsung spokesman, the thus far unrevealed GDDR7 will outperform the current DRAM solution by a 25% better performance. Even more so, the company expects to deliver up to a 36Gbps data bandwidth with the GDDR7, which is easily two times more than what the best GPU, the RTX 4090, has at the moment. With those rates, the standard 384-bit bus will deliver around 1.728 TB/s bandwidth, almost double the 1TB bandwidth of the 4090.
We still don’t have a date for this release, so we will have to stick to what we have and keep a keen eye on new information from the semiconductor market leader, Samsung, as they keep us up to date with news.