The graphics card market is full of interesting power struggles and if recent reports are true, it seems 2016 will be one of the biggest battles yet. AMD may have already put out some cards with HBM memory, and we’ve heard that Nvidia will be doing the same soon too, but don’t count GDDR memory out just yet! It seems that the upcoming GDDR5 standard is being developed by Micron, which will power mid-end graphics cards, while HBM2 will likely remain for higher end cards.
Of course, there’s some confusion here as JEDEC are already working on the GDDR5X standard, so where Micron fits in really remains to be seen, but that’s something we’ll have to wait and see. GDDR5X is said to double the bandwidth, so is GDDR6 is new standard, or just a further refinement of 5X? Either way, we can expect it to adopt a lower node, most likely starting from 20nm and working down from there, allowing for higher clocks, and lower voltages, although these kinds of improvements are the obvious targets for any increase in performance these days.
Our guess is that the revised GDDR standards will be acting as a bridge until HBM matures enough to cover a wider range of cards and budgets. Either way, 2016 is shaping up to be an exciting time in the GPU market, with new memory, new architectures, new cards and so much more on the horizon.
