GDDR6 memory technology coming to graphics cards in 2018

New GPUs demand faster memory and interconnect technologies

Samsung, one of the world's biggest makers of memory chips, has confirmed that GDDR6 memory interface technology will be introduced in 2018, not next year as was widely expected.

GDDR6 will offer bandwidth between memory and GPU of more than 14Gbps and up to to 16Gbps, according to some reports.

Based on these raw bandwidth speeds, the standard is also expected to be able to offer total memory bandwidth of up to 512GBps via a 256-bit memory bus, and up to 786GBps on a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This compares with a bandwidth of up to 12Gbps from the most recent GDDR5X parts launched earlier this year by Micron Technology.

GDDR6 will also reduce power consumption by about 20 per cent and provide an improved LP4X memory controller that is more efficient at managing the balance between voltage and clock speed.

Samsung revealed the news in a presentation at the Hot Chips technology conference in Cupertino this week, which placed GDDR6 firmly in 2018 and not 2017 as widely expected.

However, even if it is introduced in 2018 it may still take some time for the technology to percolate down from the ultra-high-end to the mainstream.

Graphics card makers have only just started shifting to GDDR5X. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 was the first to use the technology when it was launched in May 2016, and performance was boosted with the even faster Titan X just a month later.

The GTX 1080 was the first graphics card to deploy Nvidia's new GP100-series GPU, which was also the debut for the company's Pascal micro-architecture.

The GP100-series parts are the first GPUs to be based on a 16nm process technology, compared with the 28nm used on the previous Maxwell architecture parts.

AMD, Nvidia's main rival in graphics cards, has rushed out the Radeon 400 series in response based on the company's 14nm Polaris GPU. This will be closely followed by Vega perhaps before the end of the year.

The new GPUs will increasingly need to support virtual reality games and applications as the technology is expected to take off this year.