Upgrading GDDR6 Samsung said that the video card is for VR in two years

According to foreign media Computerworld website, virtual reality and games are changing the production of PCs and promoting the development of new video memory.

Samsung executive Jin Kim said at the Hot Chips conference this week that most of the GDDR5 memory GDDR5 graphics cards will be used in graphics cards in 2018. GDDR6 will be a faster and more energy-efficient memory. GDDR6 data transfer rate is 14Gbps, which is higher than 10Gbps of GDDR5.

Although Samsung plans to use GDDR6 in graphics cards in 2018, new memory usually takes a long time to market, so the above estimates may be too aggressive. Graphics cards need to be redesigned for new memory, and components need to be certified and tested, which takes time.

Applications such as virtual reality and games require quite a bit of graphics. Virtual reality helmets such as Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive only support high-end graphics cards. Although energy consumption is low, GDDR6 will help improve the performance of the graphics card.

Computerworld said that the requirements for higher performance have been changing the graphics card. New memory types such as HBM and GDDR5X have been used in AMD and Nvidia’s newly released graphics cards.

The price of graphics cards using HBM and other new video memory is still quite high. But GDDR 6 - similar to GDDR5, can be used in low-cost graphics. It is easier for a video card to use GDDR5 or GDDR5X than GDDR5 instead of HBM.

It is clear that Samsung supports GDDR6 and rival Micron supports GDDR5X. The GeForce GTX1080 graphics card uses GDDR5X memory. Samsung also supports HBM.

Computerworld said that the graphics data transfer rate is also increasing, which has driven the need for faster video memory. Faster video memory helps the graphics card process graphics faster, and then sends graphics to memory, central processors, and storage devices via faster connection technologies such as Nvidia's NVLink or PCI-Express 4.0.

The development of chip manufacturing technology has also created demand for new memory. Some of the latest graphics chips based on Nvidia’s Pascal and AMD Polaris architectures are manufactured using new processes including FinFETs.

New memory such as HBM and GDDR6 is aimed at such newly released graphics chips. GDDR5 memory is aimed at graphics chips using old manufacturing processes.