Hynix Unveils Fast Memory Chip for Games

New 512-megabit GDDR4 chips push video images to new speeds.

Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service

Hynix Semiconductor, South Korea's second largest memory chip maker, has launched the speediest memory chip aimed at game consoles and PC graphics cards available so far.

The graphics double data rate 4 (GDDR4) chips are high bandwidth DRAM memory able to process heavy volumes of gaming and video images far faster than normal PC memory chips. They're a step up from the GDDR3 generation of chips currently used on the highest performing graphics cards today. Hynix said its GDDR4 chips are also ideal for 64-bit computing.

The company on Sunday announced the availability of a 512-megabit density GDDR4, an ultra high speed memory chip that Hynix says improves data processing speed by close to two times over GDDR3.

Hynix's GDDR4 chips operate at 2.9 gigabits per second and can process 11.6GB of data in one second, the company says. It will begin shipping samples to customers soon and plans to start mass production of the chips in early 2006. By the second half of next year, the company says it will improve the speed of the chips to 14.4GB.

The fastest graphics memory chips had been limited to a speed of just 1.6 gigabits per second before the launch of GDDR4.

Competitive Field

The density and speed of Hynix's GDDR4 improves over a similar chip released by rival Samsung Electronics in late October.

At the time Samsung was able to claim first place in the race to ship GDDR4 to customers for testing. Samsung's GDDR4 is a 256-megabit chip that runs at 2.5 gigabits per second, both smaller in density and slower in speed than Hynix's offering, based on the specifications each company has released.

Samsung plans to introduce a 2.8Gbps GDDR4 chip by the end of this year. The company said it expects the high performance graphics card market to grow significantly in the second half of next year.

For its part, DDR maker Rambus has developed a technology called XDR2 that boosts data rates in and out of DRAMs. Rambus claims speeds of 8GHz, compared to 1.6GHz for GDDR3.

Overall, it has been a tough year for proponents of DDR2, who expected the new DRAM technology to take off faster than it has.

The Web sites of other major memory chip makers, including Micron Technology, Infineon Technologies, and Elpida Memory, do not carry any announcements regarding the release of GDDR4 products.