Memory

Faster and Bigger Video Memories

Qimonda launches 1Gb GDDR3 chips

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

30th of August 2007, 09:39 GMT

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Graphics card market is a very dynamic one as manufacturers of both graphics processing units and integrated boards fight to squeeze as much performance as possible for their designs. While graphics processing units, GPUs for short, get just about all the credit for the graphics performance, there is a component that is often overlooked, the graphics memory. Video memory differs from general

computer system memory in several ways, but the most striking is its speed, most of the time superior by far to the DRAM speeds.

Qimonda announced the launch of a new generation of graphics intended memory based on the GDDR3, Graphics Double Data Rate 3, a standard that offers an unprecedented combination of capacity and speed, so they are both suitable for mobile graphics solutions where space is a restricting factor and for high-end gaming and professional graphics cards that need high speeds and storage capacities. The new Qimonda graphics memory chips have a storage capacity of 1Gb or 128MB and they can reach a clock frequency of 2GHz and they are best suited for the latest generation of mobile graphics accelerators where they can provide an installed memory capacity of 512MB via an 128 bits interface or even 1GB of memory for discrete high-end graphics solutions using a 256-bit memory controller.

Apart from the new graphics memory chips, Qimonda upgraded some of its other offerings in order to remain competitive and now the manufacturing company has a line of 256Mb chips running at 2Ghz as well as 512Mb reaching 2.4GHz. The new graphics chips could be used to power graphics cards with the 256 bit interface, in which case the limit of installable memory is around 1GB or for even greater performance a 512 bit wide interface could be used which would lead to a total memory of 2GB. According to the news site xbitlabs Qimonda's new meory chips could boost the total installed graphics memory on a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra card to 1.5GB when 12 memory modules are used.

Starting in 2008 GDDR3 will be slowly replaced by GDDR5 memories and according to the marketing and market research company Mercury Research, the new memory standard will reach a market penetration of 7 percent in 2008 with a projected growth to over 40 percent in 2009. The manufacturing company Qimonda said that a prototype GDDR5 memory chips is being developed right now and it will be ready for sampling by the end of this year.

TAGS:

Qimonda | GDDR3 | GDDR5 | memory | graphics

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