Samsung develops graphic DRAM with industry-leading capacity and speed

Samsung Electronics announced on Thursday that it has developed the industry's highest-capacity and fastest graphics-specific DRAM, the 24Gb (gigabit) GDDR7 (pictured). GDDR, or Graphics Double Data Rate, is a memory product specialized for quickly processing videos and graphics based on commands from a graphics processing unit (GPU).

This new product, built on a 12-nanometer process, surpasses its predecessor, the 16Gb GDDR7, in capacity, performance, and power efficiency. Its capacity has been increased by 50%, and it achieves a speed of over 40Gbps (gigabits per second), the fastest in the graphics DRAM industry. This speed allows it to process 60 ultra-high-definition (UHD) movies, each with a capacity of 30GB (gigabytes) in just one second. Additionally, various technologies have been incorporated to reduce unnecessary power consumption, improving power efficiency by more than 30%.

As GPUs expand beyond their traditional use in gaming to serve as accelerators in artificial intelligence (AI), GDDR memory is also finding broader applications in AI. While high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is typically used for the demanding tasks of learning large datasets to create AI models, GDDR is employed during the "inference" phase when the AI models are run.

With its lower cost, fast speeds, and high power efficiency, GDDR is expected to see expanded use in the AI era. According to market research firm Data Intelo, the global GDDR market is projected to grow from approximately $5.8 billion last year to around $12.6 billion (about 17.24 trillion won) by 2032.


전남혁 기자 forward@donga.com