American memory chip manufacturer, Micron Technology, has announced at the Computex 2024 event in Taiwan that it has begun shipment of GDDR7 memory chip samples. The serial memories of this generation will be available to the company’s clients by the second half of this year. Tech giant AMD has already expressed interest in the product.
Acknowledging the relevance of artificial intelligence (AI), Micron has explicitly indicated that the GDDR7 memory can be utilized not only in gaming graphics cards but also in computation accelerators. This memory type supports Error Correction Code (ECC) and has an increased bandwidth capacity of up to 32 Gb/s. Furthermore, it utilizes up to four channels of data transmission per package, doubling the capacity compared to GDDR6. Power requirements have been reduced from 1.35V to 1.2V, allowing a 50% improvement in power efficiency.
In AI applications, GDDR7 reduces latency by 20% when generating images from text descriptions, while its bandwidth – with the utilization of a 384-bit memory bus – is a 60% improvement over GDDR6. It also improves in-game scene rendering speed by at least 30%, when operating with raster graphics or ray tracing methods at resolutions 1080p, 1440, and 4K.
In comparison with GDDR6, GDDR7 chips have also been improved. Their height has been reduced from 1.2 mm to 1.1 mm, while the transition to smaller pitch contacts allows an increase in their number from 180 to 266, even though GDDR7 can also be produced in a 180-contact configuration. AMD representatives have confirmed their collaboration with Micron in gaming solutions but did not specify release dates for their products supporting GDDR7. It’s highly likely that GDDR7 memory will be extensively used in active driver assistance systems, as they require AI interaction, and this memory is better suited for that purpose than its predecessors.
