Posted on Sunday, December 28 2008 @ 3:21 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
X-bit Labs
writes ATI expects the GDDR5 memory standard will have a long life. GDDR3 has been on the market for 4.5 years now, and is likely to be still used for another 1.5 years, and ATI believes GDDR5 will likely have a long and happy life too.
“We are still actively involved in the development of GDDR5 memory technology. The payoff of that investment is clear in that we were the first (and still the only) provider of GPUs that take advantage of this standard. GDDR5 is still early in its lifecycle, and we believe there is plenty of headroom available to continue improving its performance and power consumption before a new standard is required,” said David Cummings, director of product marketing for discrete desktop graphics at graphics products group of AMD, in an interview with X-bit labs.
The GDDR5 memory has a number of advantages over the GDDR3/4: it sports quarter data rate command clock, error detection protocol and so on. Besides, it is easier to route print-circuit boards for GDDR5 since the memory standard does not require traces that are equal in terms of length. Besides, since GDDR5 is produced using rather thin process technology, the new chips also consume less power compared to previous-gen devices.
