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Samsung Announces Mass Production of HBM2 DRAM

Accepted submission by takyon at 2016-01-19 16:23:40
Hardware

Samsung has announced the mass production [hpcwire.com] of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) packages using the second generation High Bandwidth Memory [wikipedia.org] (HBM2) interface.

AMD was the first and only company to introduce products using HBM1. AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X GPUs featured 4 gigabytes of HBM1 using four 1 GB packages. Both AMD and Nvidia will introduce GPUs equipped with HBM2 memory this year. Samsung's first HBM2 packages will contain 4 GB of memory each, and the press release states that Samsung intends to manufacture 8 GB HBM2 packages within the year. GPUs could include 8 GB of HBM2 using half of the die space used by AMD's Fury X, or just one-quarter of the die space if 8 GB HBM2 packages are used next year.

The 4GB HBM2 package is created by stacking a buffer die at the bottom and four 8-gigabit (Gb) core dies on top. These are then vertically interconnected by TSV holes and microbumps. A single 8Gb HBM2 die contains over 5,000 TSV holes, which is more than 36 times that of a 8Gb TSV DDR4 die, offering a dramatic improvement in data transmission performance compared to typical wire-bonding based packages.

Samsung's new DRAM package features 256GBps of bandwidth, which is double that of a HBM1 DRAM package. This is equivalent to a more than seven-fold increase over the 36GBps bandwidth of a 4Gb GDDR5 DRAM chip, which has the fastest data speed per pin (9Gbps) among currently manufactured DRAM chips. Samsung's 4GB HBM2 also enables enhanced power efficiency by doubling the bandwidth per watt over a 4Gb-GDDR5-based solution, and embeds ECC (error-correcting code) functionality to offer high reliability.

TSV refers to through-silicon via [wikipedia.org], a vertical electrical connection used to build 3D chip packages such as High Bandwidth Memory.

Previously: AMD Teases x86 Improvements, High Bandwidth Memory GPUs [soylentnews.org]
AMD Shares More Details on High Bandwidth Memory [soylentnews.org]
Samsung Mass Produces 128 GB DDR4 Server Memory [soylentnews.org]


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