Samsung Electronics develops world’s first GDDR7 DRAM for next-gen graphic cards

Samsung Electronics Co.’s Graphics Double Data Rate 7 (GDDR7) DRAM [Photo provided by Samsung Electronics]

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. announced Thursday that it has completed development of the industry’s first Graphics Double Data Rate 7 (GDDR7) DRAM designed for next-generation graphics cards.

Following its development of the industry’s first 24Gbps GDDR6 DRAM in 2022, the 16-gigabit (Gb) GDDR7 offering will deliver the industry’s highest speed yet, the company said.

The GDDR7 achieves an impressive bandwidth of 1.5-terabytes-per-second (TBps), which is 1.4 times that of GDDR6’s 1.1TBps and features a boosted speed per pin of up to 32Gbps.

This is enough to process about 380 full HD movies in one second. The enhancements are made possible by the Pulse-Amplitude Modulation (PAM3) signaling method adopted for the new memory standard instead of the Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) from previous generations.

The new method allows 1.5 times more data to be transmitted than NRZ within the same signaling cycle, the company said in a statement.

The new GDDR7 design also sports a 32 Gbps boosted speed per pin while being 20 percent more efficient.

To minimize heat generation, an epoxy molding compound (EMC) with high thermal conductivity is used for the packaging material in addition to IC architecture optimization.

These improvements dramatically reduce thermal resistance by 70-percent in comparison to its predecessor, aiding in stable product performance even in conditions with high-speed operations.

“Our GDDR7 DRAM will help elevate user experiences in areas that require outstanding graphic performance, such as workstations, PCs and game consoles, and is expected to expand into future applications such as AI, high-performance computing (HPC) and automotive vehicles,” said Bae Yong-cheol, executive vice president of memory product planning team at Samsung Electronics.

“The next-generation graphics DRAM will be brought to market in line with industry demand and we plan on continuing our leadership in the space,” Bae added.