Samsung will introduce the world's fastest GDDR7 memory next month – Samsung

The new memory could provide serious advantages for next-gen flagship graphics cards, especially if it reaches Nvidia's next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs.

We did not know the upcoming Samsung memory news from any official announcement. He also discovered the site Takradar, the South Korean company is holding a presentation at the 2024 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference, titled “16Gb/37Gb/s GDDR7 DRAM with Enhanced TRX Equalization for PAM3 and ZQ Calibration.” The official announcement is likely to come in the first week of February.

GDDR7 memories are currently an ongoing project for Samsung, but also for companies like SK Hynix and Micron. We've heard in the past of VRAM reaching speeds of up to 32 Gbps, but based on new data, we're seeing much faster speeds. To achieve this, Samsung is said to be using PAM3 and NRZ signals. PAM3 encoding will allow for higher data rates per cycle, providing lower power consumption while increasing memory speed.

Once the new VRAMs are released with speeds up to 37 Gbps, it will represent a significant upgrade over what we see today with GDDR6X memories. For example, Nvidia's RTX 4090 delivers 1TB/s of bandwidth thanks to 21GB/s of memory on a 384-bit bus. However, next-generation GDDR7 memory will provide this bandwidth on a 256-bit interface when clocked at 32 Gbps. Samsung's latest 37Gbps invention, when combined with a 384-bit bus, will provide an impressive bandwidth of 1.79TB/s. This performance is almost double what the RTX 4090 card can provide.

Last summer, Samsung announced 32Gbps GDDR7 memory and other companies like SK Hynix are ready for similar announcements. In particular, SK Hynix is ​​ready for its own presentation at the same conference, titled “A 35.4Gb/s/pin 16GB GDDR7 with low-power clocking architecture and I/O circuits”.

The above is however exciting news for the GPU industry, as it shows us that the future of GPUs will dramatically increase bandwidth. However, although expectations are that next-gen graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia will use GDDR7, it is unlikely that these memories will be available until then.

Of course, we may see the release of the RTX 50 series and AMD RDNA 4 with GDDR7 but at lower speeds. These will still be improvements over current-gen variants, but 37Gbps VRAM may have to wait until the next generation of GPUs, which will likely arrive in 2026.