According to Market Watch, Samsung has begun production of new GDDR5 graphic memory chips, the fastest of all chips so far.
These new memory chips will be manufactured using a 50nm process, and Mueez Deen, director of mobile and graphics memory for Samsung has said, "Our early 2009 introduction of GDDR5 chips will help us to meet the growing demand for higher performance graphics memory in PCs, graphic cards and game consoles." He also noted, "Because GDDR5 is the fastest and highest performing memory in the world, we're able to improve the gaming experience with it across all platforms."
These new chips will support a modest 7.0Gbps transfer rate, and the memory will render 3D images with a maximum of 28GB/s, beating the old GDDR4 graphics memory chips by 17.2GB/s. This will support high resolution Blu-ray and HD-DVD video, and according to Market Watch, is the equivalent of 19 1.5gb DVD-resolution movies per second. This is quite an improvement as you can see, and owes it's speed increase to a new method that means GDDR5 memory can run without having to synchronize the read/write functions to the operation of the clock.
This all means a lot, but another important improvement is that Samsung expects a production efficiency improvement of over 100%, and will run with a 20% reduction in power consumption. Essentially: faster, better and cheaper graphics chips. Samsung expects that, by the end of the year, GDDR5 graphic memory will account for a 20% of market share.
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