Hynix has just announced its GDDR4 product, integrated into gaming devices and computer graphics cards, with an operational speed of up to 2.9 Gb/s.
The GDDR4 chip, an improvement over the GDDR3 generation, is capable of processing large volumes of game and video images at significantly higher speeds than the fastest graphics memory chips currently on the market (1.6 Gb/s).
Hynix asserts that GDDR4 is the ideal product for 64-bit computing. GDDR4 also allows for the processing of a total of 11.6 Gb of data per second. The company plans to start releasing sample versions soon and will begin mass production early next year. From Q3 2006, the company aims to increase the speed to 14.4 Gb/s.
The bit density (512 Mb) and speed of Hynix’s GDDR4 surpass even the chips from competitor Samsung, which launched its GDDR4 chip with a density of 256 Mb and a speed of 2.5 Gb/s at the end of October.
Samsung has announced that it will introduce a GDDR4 chip with a speed of 2.8 Gb/s by the end of this year. The company believes that the market for high-quality graphics cards will see significant growth starting in the latter half of 2006.
Rambus, an American DDR manufacturer, has also recently developed a technology called XDR2, which boosts the data transfer rate of DRAM to 8 GHz.
