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In a surprising move, SK Hynix has announced its first memory chips based on the yet-unpublished GDDR6 standard.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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 01 2017, @05:54PM (3 children)
It almost seems like an arms race. Memory gets cheaper, and more plentiful, but shoddy programmers seem to be determined to squander all of that memory.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 01 2017, @06:39PM (2 children)
I have noticed the same trend too. But there are ways to avoid it. Open source OS, open source applications.
And I suspect C++ and other languages has a lot to do with this. On top of people that have no business designing software being shepherded into "programming".
The CPU trend will be interesting though.. they seem to not clock faster than circa 4.5 GHz. So programmers have to be smarter about that resource or see competition running them over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @02:36AM (1 child)
I'm not a programmer, so keeping that in mind: is there something wrong with C++ or the way it's being used? What are the better alternatives?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:47AM
When you write software in C++ (object oriented) it will too often implicitly suck in a lot of stuff, name space can get overloaded and some programmers like to allocate but free() is less popular.
Depending on task, use C.