Micron, over time, could be able to Push GDDR6 Performance towards 20 Gbps

Memory and NAND manufacturer Micron has released a research paper titled "16Gb/s and Beyond with Single Ended I/O in High-Performance Graphics Memory". The paper is an interesting read as it shows that GDDR6 memory not only will be a cost-effective high-bandwidth memory solution, they also will be capable of 18 Gbps, with talks about 20 Gbps.

Before we begin, we need to refer to memory bandwidth here to understand the numbers we're talking about. And as a bit of an example, a proper GeForce GTX 1080 with the latest GDDR5X memory can run 11 Gbps, often tweakable towards the 12 Gbps range. That means that in the future Micron (and others) will be able to roughly double up the digits. The news itself brings dark clouds once again hover above HBM2 memory, which remains to be very expensive fab. Micron's research paper talks about the scalability of GDDR6, with the team achieving speeds of 16.5Gbps. It should be mentioned though that Micron can achieve the 20 Gbps by bypassing their memory array to achieved GDDR6 I/O speeds of 20Gbps. We very much doubt that Micron's GDDR6 memory would be easily overclockable to 20Gbps with a bit of voltage. So the realistic numbers remain a little vague, however, things certainly are looking good. Short-term I'd say you're looking at 14 to 16 Gbps ranges.

"While the preceding results demonstrate full DRAM functionality up to as high as 16.5Gb/s, it is possible for the overall performance of an architecture to be capped by timing limitations in the memory array itself. To determine if this GDDR6 interface could extend beyond the 16.5Gb/s range, the device was placed into a mode of operation which exercises only the I/O while bypassing the memory array. The oscilloscope measurement presented in Fig.15 (below) confirms that when bypassing the memory array, and with a small, but helpful, boost in I/O supply voltage, it is possible to push Micron Technology, Inc.’s GDDR6 I/O as high as 20Gb/s."

In other news, Samsung has already announced 18Gbps GDDR6 memory, so it is possible that GDDR6 memory could reach transfer speeds of 20Gbps in time with full stability, though for now, it seems likely that early GDDR6-based products will have memory speeds of between 14Gbps and 16Gbps with some very expensive 18 Gbps options. Micron's paper is available to read here.