Micron Begins to Sample GDDR5X Memory, Unveils Specs of Chips

This past week Micron has quietly added its GDDR5X memory chips to its product catalogue and revealed that the DRAM devices are currently sampling to partners. The company also disclosed specifications of the chips they currently ship to allies and which potentially will be mass-produced later this summer. As it appears, the first samples, though running at much higher data rates than GDDR5, will not be reaching the maximum data rates initially laid out in the GDDR5X specification.

The first GDDR5X memory chips from Micron are marked as MT58K256M32JA, feature 8 Gb (1GB) capacity, and are rated to run at 10 Gb/s, 11 Gb/s and 12 Gb/s in quad data rate (QDR) mode with 16n prefetch. The chips use 1.35 V supply and I/O voltage as well as 1.8 V pump voltage (Vpp). Micron’s GDDR5X memory devices sport 32-bit interfaces and come in 190-ball BGA packages with 14×10 mm dimensions. As reported, the GDDR5X DRAMs are manufactured using 20 nm process technology, which Micron has been using for over a year now.

The GDDR5X memory standard, as you might remember from our previous reports, is largely based on the GDDR5 specification, but has three crucial improvements: significantly higher data-rates (up to 14 Gb/s per pin with potential up to 16 Gb/s per pin), higher and more flexible chip capacities (4 Gb, 6 Gb, 8 Gb, 12 Gb and 16 Gb capacities are supported) and better energy efficiency thanks to lower supply and I/O voltage.

The first samples of GDDR5X memory chips fully leverage key architectural enhancements of the specification, including quad data rate (QDR) data signaling technology that doubles the amount of data transferred per cycle over the memory bus (compared to GDDR5) and allows it to use a wider 16n prefetch architecture, which enables up to 512 bit (64 Bytes) per array read or write access. However, the maximum data rates of Micron’s sample chips are below tose initially advertised, possibly because of a conservative approach taken by Micron and its partners.

The addition of GDDR5X samples to Micron’s parts catalog has three important implications. First, the initial development of Micron’s GDDR5X memory chips is officially complete and the company has achieved its key goals (to increase performance of GDDR5X without increasing its power consumption). Second, one or more customers of Micron are already testing processors with GDDR5X memory controllers, which means that certain future GPUs from companies like AMD or NVIDIA do support GDDR5X and already exist in silicon. Third, the initial GDDR5X lineup from Micron will consist of moderately clocked ICs.

Thanks to GDDR5X memory chips with 10 Gb/s – 12 Gb/s data rates, developers of graphics cards will be able to increase peak bandwidth of 256-bit memory sub-systems to 320 GB/s – 384 GB/s. Which is an impressive achievement, because this amount of bandwidth is comparable to that of AMD’s Radeon R9 290/390 or NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti/Titan X graphics adapters. The latter use 512-bit and 384-bit memory interfaces, respectively, which are quite expensive and intricate to implement.

Micron originally promised to start sampling of its GDDR5X with customers in Q1 and the company has formally delivered on its promise. What now remains to be seen is when designers of GPUs plan to roll-out their GDDR5X supporting processors. Micron claims that it is set to start mass production of the new memory this summer, which hopefully means we’re going to be seeing graphics cards featuring GDDR5X before the end of the year.

More information about GDDR5X memory:

• GDDR5X Standard Finalized by JEDEC: New Graphics Memory up to 14 Gbps
• Micron Reports on GDDR5X Dev Progress – Volume Production This Summer

NVIDIA Announces 24GB Quadro M6000

With NVIDIA currently between GPU generations, things have been relatively quiet on the professional graphics front for the company. On the high-end NVIDIA released the Quadro M6000 back in 2015, bringing their fully enabled GM200 GPU into the professional market. Now just over a year later, they are giving the Quadro a refresh with a newer, higher capacity model.

When the original Quadro M6000 was launched, NVIDIA outfitted it with 12GB of VRAM in a 24x4Gb configuration, a large amount of memory for the time but not the full amount a GM200 card could be equipped with. Now this week the company is giving the card mid-cycle upgrade by increasing its VRAM capacity, replacing the 12GB model with a 24GB model utilizing higher density 8GB GDDR5 memory chips.

The target market for the 24GB M6000 is relatively straightforward: certain segments of the professional visualization market need all of the VRAM they can get, so for NVIDIA ecosystem users this should be a welcome upgrade. At the same time since 8Gb GDDR5 has been on the market for some time now, I’m surprised it has taken NVIDIA this long to bring GM200 to its maximum 24GB capacity. None the less this does give NVIDIA bragging rights as the highest capacity professional graphics card – surpassing the 16GB FirePro W9100 – though it’s worth noting that AMD should have the capability to push that to 32GB if they want final bragging rights.

Meanwhile NVIDIA’s press materials also briefly note that the updated Quadro M6000 ships with some new temperature & clockspeed management options – presumably via a newer firmware – though details are limited. The new M6000 features “More discrete GPU clock options for a better customer experience when running their application” and “Greater software temperature control to keep the GPU temperature below the hardware slowdown threshold for the best user experience.” NVIDIA’s professional cards (Quadro & Tesla) feature more performance controls than we see on consumer cards (which just run as fast as they can) and from the description I expect that NVIDIA has put in some new, finer grained options to better control automatic throttling behavior by manually setting both the maximum clockspeed and temperature. For single card workstations this is rarely an issue, but for large arrays of cards (e.g. Quadro VCA), keeping all of the cards in lockstep with regards to performance is a desired feature.

Finally, since this is a mid-cycle refresh, the new 24GB Quadro M6000 will be launching this week. It will be a drop-in replacement in NVIDIA’s product stack, and will occupy the previous M6000’s spot at $5000.

AMD Updates Gaming Evolved Client

Game streaming and recording has continued to be both a growing hobby and profession for many in recent years. Anytime there is growing interest in anything from society there comes a growing number of people willing to make tools to facilitate said interest. In this vein AMD and second-party developer Raptr have brought a few updates to their Gaming Evolved client in an effort to provide a more accessible means to record and share gameplay footage.

The first of these additions is what AMD is calling the Replay feature, which is a new recording mode for the Gaming Evolved client. Replay mode will start recording the moment the game starts (or when the designated hotkey is pressed), and will then record the whole gameplay session. The significance/difference of this is that it’s automatic recording of a whole gameplay session, rather than a rolling buffer for recording the last couple of minutes of gameplay, as what already happens in other modes. Though for those who want to capture both entire sessions and selected clips of the last 30 seconds, the updated client also includes a bookmark feature to do just that. All of this, by the way, flawlessly captured a video of our GTAV benchmark when I did a test run.

Going hand-in-hand with the new whote-session recording functionality, the latest update to the client also adds a basic video editor to handle the resulting video. The editor aims to make it easy to create highlight reel by simply selecting clips marked during gameplay, particularly when combined with the afformentioned benchmarks.

Finally, the Gaming Evolved client had also added a set of unique integration features with both League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For these games the client can use live match data to automatically identify important points and create highlights featuring all kills, deaths, and other shenanigans. And it sounds like AMD/Raptr aren’t done here, as integration for further games is said to be coming soon.

If you already have the Gaming Evolved client you can update new version by simply restarting your client. It’s also available to download over at AMD’s website.