Samsung announced in July 2023 that it had completed the development of the industry's first GDDR7 chip. According to Samsung's public information, the data rate of GDDR7 may reach 36 GT/s, which is significantly higher than GDDR6X's 22-23 GT/s. Samsung's GDDR7 can achieve an excellent bandwidth of 1.5 terabytes per second (TBps), which is 1.4 times that of GDDR6 1.1 TBps, and each data I/O (input/output) port can support bi-directional data transmission.
Source: Screenshot of Samsung announcement
Micron is also increasing its efforts to develop GDDR7 memory for next-generation gaming graphics cards.
Currently, the fastest graphics memory available on modern graphics cards such as Nvidia RTX 4080 is GDDR6X with a speed of 22.4 Gbps. And AMD's RX 7000 graphics card only uses GDDR6 memory, with the highest performance of 20 Gbps. The expected speed increase will become one of the main attractions of GDDR7, especially on high-end graphics cards. Samsung said last year that the development of GDDR7 will bring new features to the data center, HPC, mobile, gaming, and automotive markets. Samsung has provided samples to Nvidia to verify the next-generation system. It is noteworthy that Samsung's relevant person in charge said that GDDR7 will use PAM3 signals and NRZ. In the same signal period, the PAM3 signal method can transmit 50% more data than the NRZ signal method. Apart from Samsung, Micron is also increasing its efforts. At the beginning of July this year, Micron announced that it will launch GDDR7 in 2024. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said that the new product will be built based on the company's last year's 1ß (1-beta) DRAM process node. According to Micron's announcement at that time, the new node will not only reduce the cost of DRAM manufacturing but also improve efficiency and performance. It also revealed that 1ß will be its last DRAM production process, which will depend on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography instead of using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools.