14 DAY TRIAL // After it had acquired the Japanese DRAM manufacturer Elpida, which also supplies GDDR5 chips to graphics cards, notebooks and game console markets, Micron Technology announced it would sell its first 20 nm-class GDDR5 DRAM chips.
The company is reportedly shipping 8 Gb (1 gigabyte) GDDR5 memory chips, and hopes its new manufacturing process will help it lower costs and increase the performance of its chips.
Trying to wrestle Samsung's first place in manufacturing 20nm DRAM market share Micron hopes that coming rather late at the party will compensate by having lower prices than its competition. However, Samsung's experience in mass-producing DRAM using 20nm fabrication process since March 2014 has led to a very stable product accounting for nearly 60% of the supplier's total output by the end of the year.
Micron, on the other hand, started the 20nm trial production of DRAM at the end of 2014 and considered that it would continue competing with Samsung in the same memory class until 2016.
A futile competition
Although being clear that Samsung won the race to being the first 20nm DRAM manufacturer, Micron hopes it will definitely win the 16nm DRAM fabrication process with its 10nm-class node. Although Micron doesn't reveal much about its 10nm-class fabrication process, except the size of its smallest half pitch, Samsung is apparently not far ahead, if at all as Samsung's 1xnm technology is in fact 18nm without any cost reduction advantages or performance increases.
However, as no company in existence has ever managed to actually push 4F² cell layout into mass production, it's rather futile to see how much of a gap Micro can close against Samsung. Considering the arrival of HBM technology once AMDs Fury X has been launched and the Pascal tape-outs already completed and waiting to be refined, the GDDR5 is basically on its way out and most future GPUs will consist in a way or another some form of HBM tech.
Out of the main DRAM manufacturers, only SK Hynix is manufacturing at the moment HBM memories and will undoubtedly be also the company that Nvidia will go to when Pascal is ready.
Sticking to old tech for nearly another year might not be entirely foolish, but losing the pace when big manufacturers move quickly ahead can see you ousted from the major players' supply chain rather quickly.