Samsung ramps up video memory speeds
updated 02:45 pm EST, Fri February 23, 2007
Samsung GDDR4 Memory
Samsung today officially announced a major improvement to GDDR4 memory, its latest approach to RAM for graphics cards. The Korean firm said it had used a smaller, 80-nanometer process at its factories to reach an unprecedented 2GHz effective speed, two-thirds better than what can be found in the fastest video cards today. The 4Gbps of bandwidth created by the faster RAM should help improve both the amount of 3D detail in games and the ability to handle large-scale video editing, Samsung added.
The enhanced memory is already available to video card makers for testing and should be in production graphics cards soon afterwards. ATI's Radeon X2000 series and NVIDIA's sequel to the GeForce 8800 are expected in or near March and are strong first candidates to use the new chips.
