SK hynix is far ahead of its HBM competitors, but they're simultaneously behind their GDDR7 memory competitors, where the South Korean memory giant won't have GDDR7 memory ready until Q1 2024.
The last time we heard about SK hynix's GDDR7 memory was back at NVIDIA's GTC 2024 event (GPU Technology Conference) where we saw GDDR7 modules at 16-24Gb, up to 40Gbps speeds, and up to 160GB/sec memory bandwidth per module. The baseline of GDDR7 memory is 32Gbps and 128GB/sec bandwidth per module, so SK hynix has a rather nice 25% bandwidth improvement for future variations of GDDR7 memory.
Last week at Computex 2024, SK hynix said that its GDDR7 memory will enter mass production in Q1 2025, which should be after NVIDIA launches its GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 graphics cards. If mass production is coming in Q1 2025, then we should expect that SK hynix is already sampling customers (namely NVIDIA) right now.
- Read more: SK hynix GDDR7 memory spotted at NVIDIA GTC 2024: 16-24Gb, up to 40Gbps, up to 160GB/sec
- Read more: NVIDIA is the only one buying large amounts of GDDR7 for next-gen GPUs
- Read more: The first-gen GDDR7-based graphics cards will use 16Gb dies, 2GB minimum, and 32Gbps speeds
- Read more: JEDEC publishes GDDR7 memory standard: AMD and NVIDIA's next-gen graphics memory is ready
- Read more: Introspect ships the world's first GDDR7 memory test system, with up to 40Gbps GDDR7
NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" gaming graphics cards will use the new ultra-fast GDDR7 memory standard, while we could see AMD use GDDR7 on its next-gen RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 8000 series GPUs when they launch.
