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Samsung Updates on GDDR6 Portfolio: 8 Gb and 16 Gb at Multiple Speeds

Samsung Updates on GDDR6 Portfolio: 8 Gb and 16 Gb at Multiple Speeds

Samsung has issued an update to the GDDR6 announcement earlier this month. The company’s GDDR6 lineup will include chips featuring 8 Gb and 16 Gb capacities as well as speed bins not mentioned in the original announcement.

In addition to 16 Gb GDDR6 chips with 18 Gbps I/O speed, Samsung will offer GDDR6 with 12, 14 and 16 Gbps data transfer rates, thus targeting applications with different performance requirements. Also, two chip capacities (8 Gb and 16 Gb) will enable Samsung to target applications with various requirements for the amount of memory onboard.

Assuming both capacities will be made in all the speed bins, this gives the following:

GPU Memory Math: Samsung GDDR6
  8 Gb (1 GB) 16 Gb (2 GB)
Bandwidth Per Pin (Gb/s) 12 14 16 18 12 14 16 18
B/W per Chip/Stack (GB/s) 48 56 64 72 48 56 64 72
Max Capacity 256-bit 8 GB 16 GB
384-bit 12 GB 24 GB
Total Bandwidth (GB/s) 256-bit 384 448 512 576 384 448 512 576
384-bit 576 672 768 864 576 672 768 864

Samsung’s 16 Gb GDDR6 chips could be used for various high-end products that benefit from large amounts of memory, including graphics cards and compute accelerators. By contrast, the company’s 8 Gb GDDR6 ICs will be handy for mainstream graphics cards that do not carry large amounts of memory.

Samsung did not announce pricing of its GDDR6 products, but it is logical to expect 16 Gb chips with an 18 Gbps data transfer rate to cost considerably more than 8 Gb ICs with lower speed bins. Therefore, the large portfolio will enable Samsung to capitalize on the new type of memory.

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