Micron begin shipments for 20nm GDDR5 chip

“We commenced shipments of our first 20 nanometer graphics products,”.

This is what president of Micron, Mark Adams, said during the company’s quarterly conference call with investors and financial analysts.

The company didn’t reveal much about the technical specifications, but earlier this year Micron already sent 8Gb GDDR5 samples to two of its customers. Who are the customers? We dont know that and by the way these chips are 1GB (8 bit = 1 Byte, hence 8Gb = 1GB) modules unlike the more commonly used 512MB modules. This mean manufacturer can save space used for DRAM by decreasing the number of chips used from 16 to 8 modules to get an equivalent 8GB capacity.

Credit image to TPU, the MSI R9 390X

GDDR5 is widely used in graphic cards and also adopted in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles. Micron is not the first to release 20nm GDDR5 chips though. Samsung has already started mass production of it since early this year but somehow we still didn’t see any graphics card manufacturer using it. Somehow we still have not seen any of the new 20nm modules in action, even the lastest Nvidia 980Ti and AMD R9 390X are still using 512MB module.

SOURCE : KitGuru

Pokdepinion : Is GDDR5 still relevant while HBM is already in action? For me, yes, due to the current HBM implementation that is available in the market right now, HBM 1.0 is limited to only 4GB capacity and the VRAM can’t be overclocked at all. But worry not as the upcoming HBM 2.0 will fix the matter. Capacity is the main reason GDDR5 is and will still be relevant for some time, with the latest 1GB module giving the latest consoles or graphic cards certain advantages such as reduced PCB size. If implemented well we could have more small cards that fit ITX cases with larger VRAM.