The next-generation of graphics memory is set to arrive within the first half of next year, Micron's CEO has said. GDDR7 is planned to once again bump bandwidth while increasing efficiency—all the better for loading in painstakingly detailed game assets, namely food in Final Fantasy.
"We plan to introduce our next-generation G7 product on our industry-leading 1ß node in the first half of calendar year 2024," Micron's CEO says in a financial statement spotted by Tom's Hardware.
You can expect a race to market for the first wave of GDDR7 memory. Micron isn't alone in developing it, and at the very least Samsung will be attempting to announce the "Industry's first" chips as well, if not also SK Hynix.
It was Samsung that gave us a glimpse of what to expect from GDDR7 memory chips late last year.
Aiming to reach 36Gbps bandwidth, GDDR7 would end up significantly faster than either GDDR6 or GDDR6X, the former around 18Gbps and the latter 21Gbps. That said, there is faster GDDR6 capable of up to 24Gbps, though we've not seen that put to use in gaming graphics yet.
PAM3 signalling is one key part of the GDDR7 package. This form of Pulse-amplitude modulation is an improved method of transmitting bits at high speed, targeting higher bandwidth for lower power consumption. Funnily enough, GDDR6X actually uses PAM4 signalling, but for reasons of complexity and the potential for a noisy signal, PAM3 was decided as best option for GDDR7 and, in fact, USB4.
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Ultimately, the gain for us PC gamers is more memory performance out of a potentially cheaper, more efficient chip. Though I guess we'll see about that when the next-gen arrives. It would potentially help out those more budget graphics cards with tiny memory buses from ending up being starved for bandwidth, which will be a growing concern with some of today's slimmer cards.
As for when that'll be, a roadmap from Nvidia claims its next-gen gaming architecture will arrive in 2025, which leaves plenty of time for GDDR7 to get to market before then. As for AMD, there's still a chance it'll have something new to show with RDNA 4 next year, but with its mid- and mid/high-end graphics cards still MIA, we'll see about that. Oh and there's Intel, too, though we've little word on its plans for second-gen Battlemage as of yet.
