Micron kicks off GDDR6 volume production

Memory maker Micron Technology has announced the start of GDDDR6 DRAM chip volume production, in 8Gb capacities, promising to assist its customers with getting the parts on the market as quickly as possible.

While roadmaps had seen the first products based on the Graphics Double Data Rate 6 (GDDR6) standard hitting the market by early 2018, the actual release has been somewhat delayed by production capacity issues and reports of excess inventory at graphics card manufacturers owing to a slump in a market which had previously been buoyed by cryptocurrency mining. Now, though, Micron claims to have officially started volume production - meaning, hopefully, that the first products based on the parts are just around the corner.

'Micron is a pioneer in developing advanced high bandwidth memory solutions and continues that leadership with GDDR6. Micron demonstrated this leadership by recently achieving throughput up to 20Gb/s on our GDDR6 solutions,' crows Andreas Schlapka, director of Micron's Compute Networking Business Unit, making the most of a lead over rival Samsung's 16Gb/s score from November last year. 'In addition to performance increases, Micron has developed a deep partner ecosystem to enable rapid creation of GDDR6 designs, enabling faster time to market for customers looking to leverage this powerful new memory technology.'

Micron isn't just targeting the graphics market, though: Despite its name, Micron sees GDDR6 as being key for artificial intelligence projects, networking and storage controllers, and the automotive market - the latter tying nicely into the AI market when it comes to autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technology.

Micron's first modules to hit mass production offer an 8Gb (1GB) capacity, with larger modules expected to follow. The company is claiming a peak performance target of 64GB/s per package, it has confirmed.