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SK Hynix is almost ready to produce GDDR6 memory with higher than expected per-pin bandwidth:
In a surprising move, SK Hynix has announced its first memory chips based on the yet-unpublished GDDR6 standard. The new DRAM devices for video cards have capacity of 8 Gb and run at 16 Gbps per pin data rate, which is significantly higher than both standard GDDR5 and Micron's unique GDDR5X format. SK Hynix plans to produce its GDDR6 ICs in volume by early 2018.
GDDR5 memory has been used for top-of-the-range video cards for over seven years, since summer 2008 to present. Throughout its active lifespan, GDDR5 increased its data rate by over two times, from 3.6 Gbps to 9 Gbps, whereas its per chip capacities increased by 16 times from 512 Mb to 8 Gb. In fact, numerous high-end graphics cards, such as NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 and 1070, still rely on the GDDR5 technology, which is not going anywhere even after the launch of Micron's GDDR5X with up to 12 Gbps data rate per pin in 2016. As it appears, GDDR6 will be used for high-end graphics cards starting in 2018, just two years after the introduction of GDDR5X.
Previously: Samsung Announces Mass Production of HBM2 DRAM
DDR5 Standard to be Finalized by JEDEC in 2018
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday May 01 2017, @02:57PM (3 children)
How is a machine with only 1 GB of RAM considered "quite modern"? I would struggle to find anything under 4 GB on the market today, and they would be landfill laptops and Chromebooks with an absolute minimum of 2 GB of RAM.
You can probably find someone with a free 4 GB DDR3 module. If not, buy it yourself for $20, put it in the work computer, and take it away when you leave. Nobody will notice and you can put it in your museum later.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 01 2017, @03:09PM
Aside from all this desktop stuff, in the server and virtualization host market, nobody ever said their memory bus was too fast.
From an engineering standpoint it should be possible to make optimizations such that sequential reading is kinda the default and faster at the expense of totally random access. Remember "Row and column" strobes for dram addressing in the 80s or so, you could extend that concept way beyond 2 dimensions (not physically of course?) such that sequential access would require usually 1 or sometimes 2 address segment writes per cycle for a graphics display but totally randomly smacking some random address would take like 8 address segment loads. Like imagine 128 parallel data lines and 8 bits of address and a whole bunch of segment strobes to load up the address 8 bits at a time. I wonder if there's also some weird dual porting stuff going on such that it wouldn't really be your first choice for a CPU.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 01 2017, @04:47PM
It belongs to contractors, who have spec'd the machines to their own needs/wants. Seriously, machines that are - ohhhh - I guess they are three years old now - with decent CPU's, smallish hard drives, no optical drives, and - only ONE gig of memory. Don't ask me why, or how. They were built cheap, and that's how they run. Our own IT people weren't smart enough to realize they were getting ripped off. The machines in the offices aren't so bad as our machines in the work spaces, but they are still pretty crappy.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 01 2017, @10:15PM
This ^^^ - my father bought me a cast-off iMac from his University for $50, the only thing really "wrong" with it was that it only had 1GB of RAM - and it was upgrade capped to 2GB by Apple... We spent another (years ago) $40 to get 2GB of RAM for it and it became downright usable - for single users doing single tasks.
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