A look under the hood of GDDR5

A couple years ago, ATI (not yet purchased by AMD ) began promoting and using GDDR4, which lowered voltage requirements and increased bandwidth with a number of signaling tweaks (8-bit prefetch scheme, 8-bit burst length). It was used in a number of ATI graphics cards, but not picked up by Nvidia and, though it became a JEDEC standard, it never really caught on.

AMD's graphics division is at it again now with GDDR5. Working together with the JEDEC standards body, AMD expects this new memory type to become quite popular and eventually all but replace GDDR3. Though AMD plans to be the first with graphics cards using GDDR5, the planned production by Hynix, Qimonda, and Samsung speak to the sort of volumes that only come with industry-wide adoption. Let's take a look at the new memory standard and what sets it apart from GDDR3 and GDDR4.