Quote:Micron has announced that it has hit 16Gbps signaling in its labs. While GDDR5X at that clock won’t debut at any point in the near future, it’s still a significant achievement for a memory standard once expected to serve as a short-term filler between mainstream GDDR5 and next-generation 2.5D memory technologies.
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Micron’s Kristopher Kido, who wrote the blog post in question, expects that the company will introduce GDDR6 by 2018. That aligns well with SK Hynix, which is planning its own introductions for the same time period. And it strongly suggests that far from being developed for a single client, the way GDDR5X was used by Nvidia, we’ll see hardware from Teams Green and Red utilizing the new memory standard.

HBM2 was supposed to deliver significant improvements in bandwidth and power consumption. But while GPUs like the Radeon Nano made it clear that these benefits absolutely existed, the memory standard’s failure to breach the consumer market indicates long-term price structure issues that clearly aren’t expected to be resolved any time soon.

Quote:Micron is planning an aggressive ramp of GDDR6 technology across the entire GPU business. The introduction of GDDR6 has significant implications for the mainstream PC graphics business, where GDDR5 remains the dominant memory architecture.

GDDR5 has had an exceptional run. First introduced in 2008, it still dominates the PC graphics industry below the $300 price point, where the bulk of GPUs are sold. All good things, however, must come to an end. With VR and 4K both pushing into the mainstream, it’s time to boost memory bandwidth and capacities above the level GDDR5 provided. GDDR5X was a short-term solution to increase bandwidth at the high-end, but both AMD and Nvidia need solutions that scale upwards for lower total costs.
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When AMD switched to HBM, it justified the move due to the difficulty of scaling up GDDR5 to higher clock speeds and the increased power consumption that resulted. This paid off with Fury and Vega — by all accounts, both GPUs consume much less power than they would if they’d used GDDR5 or GDDR5X. At the same time, however, GDDR6 may present a better overall profile for future designs — especially if HBM2 costs can’t be brought under control.

Quote:The availability of a new type of memory chip is often a harbinger of new graphics processors. Micron's announcement that the company has started volume production of next-generation GDDR6 memory could be a precursor to the next go-round of cards for gamers and for data scientists in the fields of deep learning and AI. The company specifically says it has begun mass production of 8-Gb memory chips (1 GB). The company's catalog shows that initial GDDR6 RAM will have speeds ranging from 10 to 14 Gbps per pin at voltages from 1.25 to 1.35 V. An eventual 16-Gbps version will target up to 64 GB/s of bandwidth from one package.
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In any case, SK Hynix and Samsung have already announced mass production of GDDR6 memory, so Micron's relatively late ramp seems unlikely to impede any consumer products designed around this RAM that were already in the pipe. We've all heard the rumors that Nvidia will broach the topic of a new generation of GeForce cards later in August, and that may be where we first see this RAM as part of a shipping product. Only time will tell.