Micron confirms GDDR5X has entered mass production ahead of schedule

[Shawn Knight]

Nvidia announced its new GeForce GTX 10-series graphics cards late last week. Both new cards are incredibly promising but it’s the GTX 1080 that really has enthusiasts around the globe licking their chops.

In case you missed it, the flagship features a Pascal GPU built on a 16-nanometer FinFET process that is said to be faster than two GTX 980s in SLI. Sheer processing power aside, the GTX 1080 is also the first card in the world to use Micron’s new GDDR5X memory. Specifically, it’ll come loaded with 8GB of quad data rate GDDR5X at 10Gb/s which provides 320GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Unsurprisingly, Nvidia chief Jen-Hsun Huang spoke highly of the new memory.

We’ve known about GDDR5X for quite some time. Last December, Micron confirmed it was working on GDDR5X for a 2016 release. In February of this year, Micron Global Director of Graphics Memory Business Kris Kido said the technology was on track for mass production by the summer. In a recent post, however, he revealed – or rather, confirmed – that GDDR5X has already entered mass production.

Reaching that milestone ahead of schedule is great news for Micron, card manufacturers and of course, gamers. As The Tech Report highlights, Micron is facing some pretty stiff competition in the graphics memory space as Samsung began mass producing 4GB HBM2 chips earlier this year and SK Hynix is rumored to be gearing up to do the same in the near future.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/64789-micron-confirms-gddr5x-has-entered-mass-production-ahead.html

 

[Raoul Duke]

Sounds good to me. videocard-wise it seems we are a little behind the curve for the larger displays becoming more common. Nice to see what seems to be significant advancement happening.

 

[dividebyzero]

No real surprise. Micron themselves announced as much in their last earnings call in March:

In the Graphic segment, we’re enthusiastic about the early success of our GDDR5X a discrete solution for increasing data rates above 10-gigabits per second. We’ve several major design wins and expect to have the products available by the end of the current fiscal quarter.

 

[Adhmuz]

Really this should have been expected considering Nvidia plans on putting GTX 1080s on store shelves in a months time which rely on GDDR5X.

 

[dividebyzero]

Really this should have been expected considering Nvidia plans on putting GTX 1080s on store shelves in a months time which rely on GDDR5X.

Even the pilot line should be able to supply a fair quantity of chips. IC's dont get simpler than memory cells/chips. At 14mm * 10mm per chip, that's around 420 die candidates per 300mm wafer. As far as I'm aware. Micron began production even before the JEDEC specification was ratified in January (kind of a rubber stamp anyway since Micron wrote the specification).

 

[hahahanoobs]

No real surprise. Micron themselves announced as much in their last earnings call in March:

In the Graphic segment, we’re enthusiastic about the early success of our GDDR5X a discrete solution for increasing data rates above 10-gigabits per second. We’ve several major design wins and expect to have the products available by the end of the current fiscal quarter.

You got mass production earlier than expected from that?

 

[dividebyzero]

You got mass production earlier than expected from that?

The statement says they expect to have products available ( product catalogue) by the end of the current fiscal quarter. The fiscal quarter ends 30 June. The previous mass production target was in the Summer. Technically Summer starts 21st June, but the inference was that the ramp would take place during the Summer, not the moment it technically arrived.