Micron, Rambus, & Others Team Up To Spur GDDR6 Adoption in Non-GPU Products
by Ryan Smith on January 23, 2018 9:00 AM EST
anandtech.com
excerpt:
For regular AnandTech readers, the drums of GDDR6 have been beating loudly for most of the last year now. The new memory standard replaces the venerable GDDR5 memory, which, to make long-time readers feel old, launched 10 years ago. While GDDR5 has evolved well beyond its initially planned lifecycle to meet the needs of the industry, it’s finally begun to reach its apex, and a new memory standard has been needed to take its place. GDDR6 then promises to be a big deal, offering a significant jump in memory bandwidth over GDDR5 – and even GDDR5X – giving processors of all sorts a much-needed boost.
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The other big aim for the group is the rapidly expanding autonomous car market. This market has a lot in common with the graphics market in as much as it involves a lot of visual processing, though reversing the situation by making it incoming data instead of outgoing data. More advanced cars, particularly level 5 fully autonomous designs, require a massive amount of sensor data and accordingly a great deal of memory bandwidth to carry that data. In this respect the group is looking to grab a foothold in a new market, as this market is expected to boom over the coming years, and there’s ample opportunity to sell memory here.
Ultimately driving GDDR6 adoption outside of the graphics market still remains an uphill battle, both for inertia reasons and because it’s not the only high-bandwidth memory technology vying for a piece of the market. However compared to the fledging efforts to get GDDR5 adopted in this fashion, Micron’s efforts to bring together IP providers is a lot more organized than before, thanks in large part to the fact that it significantly reduces the barrier towards adding GDDR support on the logic side of matters. Micron for their part is already sampling their GDDR6, with mass production set to begin this quarter, so if Micron’s efforts make headway, then potential customers should be able to get started very soon on integrating GDDR6 IP into their designs.
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