Samsung to kick off HBM mass production in early 2016, right in time for Pascal?

At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, Samsung revealed plans to enter the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) market in 2016. The South Korean conglomerate is currently getting everything ready to start mass production in 2016, the initial focus will be on graphics cards and HPC computing solutions but in 2017 the market is expected to be extended to network solutions as well.

Previously there were rumors about HBM shortages and AMD having a priority supply deal in place with SK Hynix but if Samsung can get its HBM out of the door in high volumes in early 2016 this bodes well for NVIDIA's Pascal GPU.

For graphics cards, Samsung's roadmap is showing various HBM solutions. For mainstream cards the company targets 2GB HBM chips with a bandwith of 256GB/s and for performance-class graphics cards it will have 4GB chips with 512GB/s bandwidth, these two solutions will feature two stacks of HBM.

For enthusiast-class memory Samsung is working on HBM with 4 stacks, this will see 8GB chips with 512GB/s bandwidth and 16GB chips with 1TB/s bandwidth. The most extreme chips are those for the HPC market, there Samsung will offer 8-high stacks of HBM with a capacity of 48GB and bandwidth of 1.5TB/s.

Samsung promises mass production will start in early 2016 but we do not have a more detailed timeline of when these chips will hit the market.



Via: ComputerBase