Friday, November 25, 2016

Micron confirms GDDR5X now in mass production



This announcement would possibly seem a chunk anticlimactic now that Nvidia has already said that the GeForce GTX 1080 will use GDDR5X RAM, but Micron has introduced that GDDR5X is now in mainstream manufacturing, months beforehand of its firstly predicted time table.
One exciting issue about the GTX 1080 is that the RAM it uses is on the decrease-end of the reminiscence Micron said it could ship. GDDR5X has formerly been touted as an answer able to imparting up to 12.0 Gbps of bandwidth in quad-records rate (QDR) mode. Nvidia, in contrast, has said that the GTX 1080 uses just 10Gbps reminiscence — closer to the low-stop of the scale. One ability advantage of beginning at the decrease give up, but, is that the company has lots of headroom to scale within the future.
Absolute bandwidth at the GTX 1080 is 320GB/s, which nearly suits the GTX 980 Ti while retaining the GTX 980’s 256-bit reminiscence bus. retaining the memory bus small is one way to govern die size and decrease manufacturing charges; big ring buses consume up die area and devour a considerable quantity of electricity.
brand-new preferred or GDDR4?
We suspect that GDDR5X may be just like GDDR4. GDDR4 was delivered with the aid of AMD in 2006 as a manner to improve reminiscence bandwidth and GPU performance. Nvidia by no means switched to GDDR4, who prefer rather to preserve GDDR3 until GDDR5 became to be had. AMD used GDDR4 in diverse merchandise from 2006 – 2009, at which point it moved to GDDR5.
AMD hasn’t stated whether or not or now not it will use GDDR5X in upcoming merchandise, however the truth that Nvidia is best using GDDR5X for the GTX 1080 shows that the reminiscence is still instead luxurious; the GTX 1070 uses GDDR5. AMD’s Polaris is predicted to goal the mainstream pc marketplace, which means that it’ll possibly use GDDR5 as properly. in the meantime, both AMD and Nvidia are making plans overdue-year launches for subsequent-era merchandise, both of which might be confirmed to apply HBM2.
The implication right here is that GDDR5X’s market function long-time period will depend on whether or not or now not AMD and Nvidia see a need for the memory to offset better prices in HBM2. If HBM2 fees come down surprisingly quick, there may not be lots room left for GDDR5X within the market, given that GDDR5 is produced by means of a couple of companies and is tremendously cheap (Micron, thus far, is the only business enterprise constructing GDDR5X). If, however, interposer charges live excessive, we can also still see all three requirements in-marketplace for some period of time.
What’s fantastically not likely is that we’ll see any single GPU supporting each HBM2 and GDDR5X. assets we’ve spoken to have indicated that assisting each memory standards concurrently within the same silicon would be extremely tough for minimal benefits. supporting GDDR5 and 5X within the same silicon is tons less difficult than an HBM2 + GDDR5X configuration.

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