SK Hynix teases first GDDR6 wafer, promises up to 16GHz

Memory maker SK Hynix showcased one of its first GDDR6 wafers at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference 2017 in San Jose and banged the drums about the improved specifications of this new standard. The early sample shown at GTC2017 is a 8Gb (1GB) chip and SK Hynix promises it will be able to offer versions with a data rate of up to 16Gbps.

That's double as fast as the old GDDR5 and 4Gbps faster than the fastest GDDR5X chips that are currently on the market. SK Hynix recently hinted the first video card with its GDDR6 technology will start shipping in early 2018 and there's reason to believe this is Volta-based card from NVIDIA.

GDDR6 runs at a voltage of 1.35V, while GDDR5 required 1.55V. Besides the 8Gb (1GB) chips, SK Hynix will also be offering 16Gb (2GB) models.

I think a good example for quick comparison would be GTX 1070 with 256-bit memory bus and 8 Gbps memory speed. If the successor (GTX 2070?) was to feature GDDR6 memory, we would be looking at 512 GB/s bandwidth compared to 256 GB/s we currently have. Although it seems reasonable to expect slower GDDR6 variants in XX70 and XX60 series (12, 14 Gbps?).

The main advantage of GDDR6 versus the HBM2 technology is that GDDR6 remains a lot cheaper and to implement.

Source: VideoCardz