Micron: GDDR5X Has Arrived

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Micron Technology announced yesterday via its company blog that GDDR5X will hit mass production as soon as this summer.

There have been a variety of rumors in the industry about GDDR5X availability timeframes, so I’d like to clear that up from the beginning: Micron’s GDDR5X program is in full swing and first components have already completed manufacturing. We plan to hit mass production this summer. The team at our Graphics DRAM Design Center in Munich, Germany is doing a fantastic job, too. Not only do we have functional devices earlier than expected, these early components are performing at data rates of more than 13Gb/s!
 
Only the utlraflagship cards that have a hope of utilizing HBM's extra bandwidth will have it (see: AMD Fury X's inability to utilize that extra bandwidth at playable framerates). So sorry to disappoint you, but HBM is GP100 only, which means this year's Titan and next year's 1080 Ti will have HBM, while the 1080 and 1070 will have GDDR5X, and lower cards will have GDDR5.
 
lostinseganet said:
So this ram will be lay flat on a motherboard like a CPU?
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Just about all current RAM is like this. GDDR RAM is always placed straight to the GPU. System RAM is attached to sticks. Where have you been? :confused:

If you mean CPU as in current CPU sockets, no. It will be the same as BGA CPUs, such as those commonly used in mobile devices. While most desktops/servers or high performance CPUs use LGA.
 
Little late there Micron, having HBM available probably means GDDR5X chips will be relegated to mid and low tier graphics cards. Looks like Micron missed the opportunity to charge premium prices.
 
Yakk said:
Little late there Micron, having HBM available probably means GDDR5X chips will be relegated to mid and low tier graphics cards. Looks like Micron missed the opportunity to charge premium prices.
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I'm not so sure about that. Doubling the bandwidth of the existing memory technology (read: no new tooling or manufacturing techniques for card manufacturers) should significantly postpone the mainstream adoption of HBM.

Sure, the "ultra high end" will probably push forward with HBM, but that's low volume business anyway.
 
Parja said:
I'm not so sure about that. Doubling the bandwidth of the existing memory technology (read: no new tooling or manufacturing techniques for card manufacturers) should significantly postpone the mainstream adoption of HBM.

Sure, the "ultra high end" will probably push forward with HBM, but that's low volume business anyway.
Click to expand...

GDDR5X is already just starting in the middle of its potential selling "life", while HBM is just at the beginning of its selling life. When something better than HBM comes along then HBM will be downgraded to where GDDR5X is now is what I was saying. Not that GDDR5X won't be profitable, I'm sure it will be extremely profitable, but the time it took Mucron o bring it out was very costly in money lost over the lifetime of the product.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Just about all current RAM is like this. GDDR RAM is always placed straight to the GPU. System RAM is attached to sticks. Where have you been? :confused:

If you mean CPU as in current CPU sockets, no. It will be the same as BGA CPUs, such as those commonly used in mobile devices. While most desktops/servers or high performance CPUs use LGA.
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Just trying to think out of the box a bit because in post two Modred189 said

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1042131884&postcount=2

So instead of thinking it would stand upright...mayybe they may try something different.
 
So, with system ram, the BGA chips are put on a stick, 8 at a time (9 for ECC).

Here you can see the chips:
s-l1000.jpg


This is of course DDR3, not GDDR5X.

Now, on a Video card they just put the chips right on the PCB of the video card itself.
 
So, yeah I would expect regular GDDR5 to get phased out pretty quick. My bet is we will see one GPU from AMD with HBM, and then one or two from nVidia. GP100 for sure, and GP104 maybe. GDDR5X taking the cards below HBM, and then DDR3 (ugh) on the low end. We will probably still see some GDDR5 this gen, but I bet it wont be around much longer.
 
I concede that that will be the configuration of the chips :)
...Just wanted to jump into the maybe pool a bit.
 
lostinseganet said:
I concede that that will be the configuration of the chips :)
...Just wanted to jump into the maybe pool a bit.
Click to expand...

Let's dive in then...
Why not make GDDR modular and replaceable (other than business reasons, i.e., selling more cards)? Does a ram slot necessarily introduce unacceptable amounts of latency?
 
Well, at the extremely high speed the data lines run on GDDR5/X it would be pretty hard to make it work reliably. It's not that connectors add latency, but they degrade the signal quality and they are already pushing it pretty hard. It would probably be possible, yes, but the connectors to do it would probably be fairly expensive.
There were cards in the past that did this sort of thing, though. I remember like the Matrox G200 or maybe it was the G400's that had like 2 or 4MB on board and then you could add another 2 or 4MB with an upgrade card that was like an SO-DIMM. I had a couple of those back in the day, and some even had the extra ram on them, too.
 
extide said:
Well, at the extremely high speed the data lines run on GDDR5/X it would be pretty hard to make it work reliably. It's not that connectors add latency, but they degrade the signal quality and they are already pushing it pretty hard. It would probably be possible, yes, but the connectors to do it would probably be fairly expensive.
There were cards in the past that did this sort of thing, though. I remember like the Matrox G200 or maybe it was the G400's that had like 2 or 4MB on board and then you could add another 2 or 4MB with an upgrade card that was like an SO-DIMM. I had a couple of those back in the day, and some even had the extra ram on them, too.
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Man, i could see Nvidia and AIB partners doing this to make more money off existing cards. It wouldn't really extend the life of the GPU, but could be a nice add-on for gamers between cycles. I think the biggest issue would be integration into modern style cooling systems. That Matrox G200 had almost nothing on top for cooling.
Matrox_Millennium_G200_SGRAM_REV_A_1998.jpg

Where are you going to put a memory slot on something like this-
index.php

or
card-front-flat.jpg
 
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