Here's a quick but interesting news byte for you all:
It seems like graphics card technology is advancing at a nearly alarming rate. It wasn't that long ago that we were celebrating DDR RAM on chips, and now we're already seeing models with GDDR3 and GDDR4 as a standard. Samsung broke new records in this need for speed last week - its new GDDR4 memory modules
have hit 2GHz.
The new modules transmit data at up to 4 GB/s, which is more than a 65% increase over current speeds. The previous versions of GDDR4 have been at 2.4 GB/s. Samsung has been able to do the speed increase thanks to its recent move down to 80nm chip fabrication. Samples are already hitting the company's customers, so this is not any theoretical design or one-off R&D unit. The production units are currently slated to be 64MB chips.
Since Samsung is one of the world's largest chip manufacturers, the move could mean a sudden and sharp increase in graphics card speed just in time for DX10 cards to start permeating the market. Thanks to the smaller fab, the chips should also lower heat output and cost.
Do you have a thought on the next step forward in GDDR? Let us hear about it
in our forums.
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