GDDR7 memory from Micron within a year
Consumers can now expect the first GDDR7 products in the first half of 2024.
Whatever NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel have in store for next year, Micron will be ready with its next-gen graphics memory. Over the past two years, the GDDR7 standard has been repeatedly mentioned by various memory manufacturers, but it hasn’t yet entered the sampling phase yet.
As part of the Micron’s fiscal Q3 2023 earnings call, Micron’s CEO has confirmed that the company will introduce new G7 product on its 1ß node next year. Unfortunately, the company is not yet ready to share further details, such as potential speeds that the new memory could offer.
In graphics, industry analysts continue to expect graphics’ TAM compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to outpace the broader market, supported by applications across client and data center. We expect customer inventories to normalize in calendar Q3. We plan to introduce our next-generation G7 product on our industry-leading 1ß node in the first half of calendar year 2024.
— Sanjay Mehrotra, President and Chief Executive Officer
The GDDR6 memory is currently shipping with speeds up to 20 Gbps (Radeon RX 7900 series), while Micron’s GDDR6X technology for NVIDIA RTX 40 series goes up to 22.4 Gbps (RTX 4080).
Other companies, like Samsung, have already announced their plans to introduce 36 Gbps GDDR7 memory in the future. Unfortunately, unlike Micron, Samsung did not confirm when GDDR7 memory would become available.
A potential graphics card equipped with a 384-bit memory bus would offer 1.7 TB/s of maximum theoretical bandwidth, so 70% more than RTX 4090. Gamers should probably not expect such speeds with first generation G7 products, in fact, higher bandwidth may result in narrower memory buses being used by next-gen GPUs as long as higher bandwidth is still provided.
Source: Micron (PDF)
