Samsung begins mass production of 16 Gb GDDR6 memory

Samsung continues to deliver new memory products based on the 10 nm technology, and this time we are talking about the industry's first 16 Gb GDDR6 chips for use in next-gen graphics cards, as well as network, automotive, and artificial intelligence applications.

According to the official press release, the new GDDR6 memory provides a pin speed of 18 Gbps and is capable of reaching a data transfer speed of 72 GBps. Compared to the 8 Gb GDDR5 memory with a pin speed of 8 Gbps, this is a solid increase of more than 200 percent. Thanks to the new low-power circuit design, the GDDR6 memory operates at 1.35 V, thus using about 35 percent less energy than the 1.55 V GDDR5 memory. At last, the 10 nm 16 Gb GDDR6 chips also come with a 30 percent manufacturing productivity gain over the 20 nm 8 Gb GDDR5.

Although Samsung says what we already touched in the first paragraph, namely that the new memory solution will be used "in rapidly growing fields such as 8K Ultra HD video processing, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence," they do not mention any specific product. However, we already know that the NVIDIA Volta GPUs will hit the market with GDDR6 memory onboard soon, so if you are planning a video card upgrade, then you should get ready for the GTX 2000 series.