Qimonda features GDDR5 memories

Munich (Germany) – Waiting for the JEDEC consortium to finalize the GDDR5 (Graphics Double Data Rate version 5) memory specification, which, like previous versions, will be mainly used in graphics cards, the German chipmaker Quimonda has already distributed to its partners 512Mbit GDDR5 memory samples.

With this move the former division of Infineon, which today is considered the third largest producer of DRAM memories in the world, hopes to accelerate the market introduction of GDDR5 memory and to immediately mortgage a substantial slice of this sector.

GDDR5 memory chips will have a density between 512 Mbit and 2 Gbit , and will allow manufacturers to manufacture modules with a maximum capacity of 4GB. GDDR5 will provide data transfer rates up to 20GB per second per module : According to Qimonda, this is more than double the bandwidth offered by the fastest GDDR3 memory on the market today.

The new GDDR memory specification also includes more features dedicated to energy saving especially notebooks, and the error correction support . More technical details can be found in this Qimonda PDF document.

The first graphics cards equipped with GDDR5 memory are expected on the market during the second half of 2008.