GDDR7 memory is back in the news at GTC 2024. Indeed, SK Hynix was showing off what’s in store for us in terms of capacity, speed and bandwidth. Clearly, it makes mouths water!
GDDR7: 160 GB/s modules in 24 Gb at GTC 2024!
The new generations of graphics cards are unlikely to offer any dazzling increases in capacity. As we’ve seen, the first GDDR7 memory chips will have to make do with capacities of 16 Gb, which means 2 Gb per chip. The current GDDR6 manages to offer this kind of capacity. However, this first batch should see an increase in bandwidth, if only thanks to the higher speed of the chips: 28 Gbps.
However, technology is like wine: it improves with age. And SK Hynix is taking advantage of the GTC to show us what they’re capable of in the future.
Future memory chips will be much faster and offer greater capacity. We should see 16 Gb and 24 Gb memory, i.e. 2 GB and 3 GB. But it’s above all in terms of frequency and throughput that things are improving. For example, the memory presented had a bandwidth of 160 Gb/s with a speed of 40 Gbps.
So, with ” early ” memory, a hypothetical RTX 5060 with a 128-bit memory bus would offer a maximum VRAM capacity of 8 GB with a maximum bandwidth of 448 GB/s. With the memory specifications on display, this would increase to 12 GB, while bandwidth would reach 640 GB/s!
However, the JEDEC specifications show that this standard will be able to reach 48 Gbps in speed. As for maximum capacity, we’re talking about 64 Gb, or 8 Gb per memory chip. With a 128-bit bus, a graphics card will be able to offer 64 GB of VRAM… Well, if this is the case, it will certainly be on professional graphics cards.
In the meantime, we’re not likely to see the arrival of such features any time soon, since these memory chips aren’t due to hit the market until 2026 – 2027.
