Nvidia Volta GPUs (GTX 2000) to come with Samsung's GDDR6 memory, reaching 16 Gbps transfer rates

Last year, Samsung was announcing the GDDR6 memory mainly targeted at gaming GPUs, claiming that it could reach 14 Gbps transfer rates and should be released by the end of 2017. Apparently the GDDR6 technology was now pushed to early 2018, but, meanwhile, Samsung managed to increase the throughput to 16 Gbps. 

New GDDR6 details were revealed in a Samsung press release that claims that not less than 36 of its new products had already been recognized as CES 2018 Innovation Award winners, ahead of the January CES trade show held in Las Vegas. Among the winning products is the unreleased 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory module that won the title for fastest and lowest-power DRAM for graphics-intensive applications. According to the press release, the GDDR6 module “processes images and video at 16Gbps with 64GB/s data I/O bandwidth, which is equivalent to transferring approximately 12 full-HD DVDs (5GB equivalent) per second.”

The fastest current memory module is the GDDR5X that comes with the GTX 1080 Ti flagships from Nvidia, which has a throughput of 11 Gbps and needs 1.5 V. The GDDR6 is almost 50% faster, needs only 1.35 V, and is expected to be released with the first Nvidia Volta (GTX 2000 series) gaming GPUs in early 2018. JEDEC informs that the densities for the GDDR6 memory modules range from 8 Gb up to 32 Gb.

Samsung also announced that they are planning to release the HBM gen 3 memory modules in 2019/2020, creating a viable alternative for the GDDR6 standard.  It will be interesting to see if Samsung can match the GDDR6 transfer rating on the HBM3 memory, as the HBM2 is only able to reach 1.9 Gbps speeds currently.

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