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Samsung’s GDDR6W Doubles Performance and Capacity

introduced by samsung (opens in new tab) A completely new type of GDDR6 memory that doubles the capacity of the DRAM package and widens the interface width to double the peak bandwidth. Samsung’s GDDR6W chip uses his traditional BGA package and can be used for mainstream applications such as the best graphics cards.

Modern GDDR6 and GDDR6X chips integrate a single DRAM device with a 32-bit interface. In contrast, GDDR6W chips have two 32-bit interfaces because they have two DRAM devices, so the capacity (from 16Gb to 32Gb per chip) and the interface width (from 32-bit to 64-bit) increase. Twice as much. To that end, Samsung’s GDDR6W chips use the company’s Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP) technology, which replaces traditional printed circuit boards with thinner, redistribution layers (RDL ).

(Image credit: Samsung)

Samsung’s GDDR6W devices typically use the same protocol as GDDR6 but offer higher performance and capacity. For example, a 32Gb GDDR6W memory chip can deliver a peak bandwidth of up to 176 GBps, up from 88 GBps for his regular GDDR6 SGRAM chips. On the other hand, using two 16Gb memory devices he could build a 32Gb memory chip cheaper than building a 32Gb monolithic memory device.

According to the memory maker, the use of the FOWLP package will reduce the thickness of the GDDR6W package from 1.1mm for standard GDDR6 chips to 0.7mm, making it easier to cool. There is common sense that FOWLP packages are more expensive than traditional BGA packages, but it is unclear how much the former costs more than the latter. Note, however, that Samsung’s GDDR6W is cheaper than high-bandwidth memory like HBM2E, both in terms of memory stack production and usage, as it doesn’t require the use of expensive interposers. is needed.

(Image credit: Samsung)

To put the advertised GDDR6W performance numbers into context, Samsung claims that the 512-bit GDDR6W memory subsystem (using 8 chips) offers up to 1.40 GBps system-level bandwidth at a data transfer rate of 22 GTps. says it can. In contrast, the 4096-bit HBM2E memory subsystem offers up to 1.60 TBps at a data transfer rate of 3.2 GTps, but at a significantly higher price.

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