Samsung To Reveal The World’s Fastest GDDR7 Memory In February
The Korean giant will announce a new graphics memory at the ISSCC 2024 exhibition, which will be held from February 18 to 22.
The GDDR7 memory that Samsung is preparing will allow data transfer rates of up to 37 Gbps per pin, which corresponds to a bandwidth of 37 GT/s. That is, the new 16 GB Samsung GDDR7 chip will be able to provide data transfer speeds of up to 148 GB/s, and the memory subsystem of a video card from such chips in combination with a 384-bit bus will provide a throughput of 1.776 TB/s. For comparison, the current GeForce RTX 4090 with GDDR6X memory provides 1.008 TB/s. In addition to higher performance, the Samsung GDDR7 chip, according to the manufacturer, consumes 20% less energy.
The PAM3 circuit helped to achieve such high speeds – pulse amplitude modulation with three signal levels (-1, 0 and +1). This mechanism allows three data bits to be transferred in two cycles, which is more efficient than GDDR6’s two-level NRZ. However, PAM3 signals are more difficult to generate and decode than NRZ signals, which leads to increased power consumption, and they are more susceptible to interference.
While the chip’s unveiling is right around the corner, it may be some time before it appears in GPUs and other products. NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 50 series GPUs are expected to use Samsung’s latest GDDR7 DRAM.
