When GDDR2 was released, not many people cared. The new technology offered only a slight increase in clock speeds over the existing GDDR, and typically cost quite a bit more. When GDDR3 came out, both NVIDIA and ATI were quick adopters due to the potentially tremendous clock speed increases it offered. Today, bandwidth of GDDR3 chips on a 512-bit bus can come very close to the 150GBps mark. GDDR4, while slightly faster than GDDR3, does not offer a tremendous performance increase, and consequentially has only been adopted by ATI. In spite of the inherent disadvantage of GDDR3, NVIDIA graphics cards that use the older interface exclusively have not fallen behind ATI in terms of performance.

GDDR5, however, like GDDR3, is a technology that both manufacturers will surely be jumping all over when it comes time to release their new graphics cards during Summer 2008. The 5th generation graphics memory was first sampled in November of 2007. Since then, the technology has matured to the point where companies like Qimonda can produce 512MB chips with clock speeds starting at 3.60GHz. Qimonda has also sampled chips with clock speeds up to 4.5GHz. At these speeds, GDDR5 bandwidth easily doubles the maximum achieved by shipping GDDR3 chips. And that is just the start. In December of last year, Samsung announced that they had GDDR5 chips operating at 6GHz.

The very high clock speed ceiling for GDDR5 along with the lower power requirements make the new technology an easy choice for both NVIDIA and AMD. While price is most certainly an issue, most analysts expect prices to compete with the relatively expensive GDDR3 and GDDR4 chips available today before too long. Increased manufacturing costs will also apply to the actual graphics boards developed by AMD and NVIDIA, as there are 34 more pins on the GDDR5 package than there are on GDDR3/GDDR4 DRAM chips. There is no way to quantitatively predict this increase in cost, but evidence of it should be blatantly clear when launch time comes for NVIDIA and AMD (GT200, RV770) in the next two months.

Source: X-bit Labs

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