Samsung engages mass production 50nm GDDR5

Samsung has started the mass production of GDDR5 graphics memory on the 50 nm production process. These memory chips are mostly used in graphics cards and gaming consoles. GDDR5 memory was first used on a large scale when ATI released its Radeon HD4870 graphics card, in the second half of 2008. 

The memory will feature a maximum transfer speed of 7,0 Gbit/s and supports up to 28 GByte/s of bandwidth. Unlike GDDR4, GDDR5 is able to operate a lot faster because the reading and writing speeds no longer have to be synchronised with the clock frequency. The transition of 60 nm to a 50 nm process for the GDDR5 memory will almost double the production efficiency. Thanks to this decrease in size, the chips are also able to run at lower voltages (1,35 V) which could lead to a power consumption decrease of up to 20% when compared to the conventional GDDR4 memory which operates at 1.8 V. 

Despite the economic recession, Samsung expects that the demand for GDDR5 memory will increase even further, especially in the PC desktop and gaming console market. The company intends to serve 20% of the complete graphics card memory market in 2009. Samsung also announced plans to expand the 50nm production process to its entire line-up of memory products. 

Tags: gddr4 gddr5 hd4870 radeon

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