Samsung develops GDDR5 memory for fast video cards

Samsung began the week by revealing GDDR5, the latest incarnation of double data rate memory built specifically for video cards. The technology is billed as the fastest memory available of any kind and provides information to a graphics chipset as quickly as 6 gigabits per second -- nearly twice as fast as the 3.2 gigabits found on the more commonly used GDDR3 format, Samsung says. On a typical 512 megabit design with 32 stacked chips, this amounts to 24 gigabytes of bandwidth that the firm claims is enough to play 16 DVD videos at once. This memory is also 20 percent more power-efficient than the earlier graphics technology.

GDDR5 is already in testing and is believed to eventually find its way into upcoming video cards and eventual video game consoles; full-scale production is set for the first half of 2008 and is likely to appear first in very high-end cards such as NVIDIA's GeForce 9 series and future Radeon HD 3000-series cards. More than half of all high-end computer graphics will use GDDR5 by 2010, according to Samsung.