Samsung is now mass-manufacturing GDDR6 memory for your next GPU

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

For the first time, Samsung is manufacturing GDDR6 memory in mass quantities. The memory is faster and more efficient than the GDDR5 memory it succeeds, and itwill likely appear on PC graphics cards this year.

Samsung's GDDR6 memory is based on the company's 10-nanometer technology and offers double the density of the company's 20-nanometer GDDR5 offerings, meaning 16 gigabits instead of eight gigabits. The company promises an 18Gbps pin speed and transfer rates of up to 72GB/s. Further, the new chips will run at 1.35V. The GDDR5 predecessor has a pin speed of 9Gbps and runs at 1.55V.

The result should be significantly faster video cards for gaming and other tasks like video processing and Ethereum mining, if you're into that sort of thing. Samsung's press release says, "immediate production of GDDR6 will play a critical role in early launches of next-generation graphics cards and systems." The GDDR6 chips Samsung is producing will generally edge out what we're currently seeing in GDDR5X in terms of performance.