Qimonda was the first to announce samples of GDDR5 back in November of last year. It has also been one of the companies working closest together with the graphics card makers to ensure that GDDR5 becomes the next graphics memory standard. It has now told X-bit labs, that GDDR5 is getting ready to ship in volumes. Qimonda currently has 512Mb chips operating at 3.6. 4.0 and 4.5GHz in production. AMD/ATI is expected to use 4.0GHz chips downclocked 3.7GHz to save power, but still leave some headroom for overclocking.
“Qimonda was the first to announce samples of GDDR5 back in November 2007. We have proven the technology and we can deliver in volume production to the market today,” said Glen Haley, communications director of Qimonda in North America.
GDDR5 uses 25% more pins than GDDR3, 170 vs. 136, which will result in more complex PCBs if you compare two cards with the same amount of chips. On the other hand, GDDR5 runs at twice the frequency, which means that you only need half as many chips to achieve the same bandwidth. In the end, the GDDR5 PCB will still be simpler and cheaper than the GDDR3 PCB.
The only GPU that supports GDDR5 today is the upcoming AMD RV770. The NVIDIA G8x/G9x/GT200 architectures only supports GDDR3, which is a result of the complicated GDDR4 situation. We can’t really tell you what happened there, but it was a bit of a “situation”. NVIDIA will be stuck with GDDR3 for now, but future chips may very well have GDDR5 support.
The exact pricing of the chips was not revealed in the interview, but when Samsung and Hynix also start to ship volumes of GDDR5, prices should come down a bit.
