We have previously reported the rumours that Nvidia was planning to use GDDR5X on their upcoming Pascal graphics cards, a rumour that not everyone bought right away. But there are quite a few reasons that we could see this happen and the newest leak seems to support this.
Last time it was a German site that leaked the GDDR5X information and this time we get news from a Russian outlet that got their hands on what looks like leaked slides from Micron of the upcoming GDDR5x memory. The site also suggests that this won’t be limited to only Nvidia, but that AMD also will want to get on board and use this type of memory on some of their graphics cards next year.
HBM, and HBM2 might be very exciting and be the next mainstream graphics memory, but it is still a costly one to produce and the production is also limited. This leaves room for the next GDDR5 standard to make its entry. GDDR5X offers double the data-rate per memory access of 64 byte/access compared to 32 byte/access of the current GDDR5 standard. Where current GDDR5 tops out at around 7Gbps, the new standard will initially offer 10-12 Gbps with a later goal to achieve 16 Gbps.
The implementation of the new memory should be relatively easy and cheap for manufacturers as the new chips will retain the same pin layout. With all this information, we can assume that HBM will be reserved for the top-tier graphics cards for the foreseeable future while GDDR5x will breath more power into mid-level and entry-level cards and allow them to perform better at the ever-increasing resolutions.
