Hynix Semiconductor, one of the biggest producers of memory chips globally, has announced that they have managed to build GDDR5 memory chips capable of working at an effective frequency of 7 GHz.

The GDDR5 chips are used to power the Radeon HD 4870 and the Radeon HD 4870X2, but they will be used on a larger scale in the next generation of graphic cards.

The main advantage of the GDDR5 memories is that they are QDR (Quad Data Rate). So the working frequency of the memory chip is four times bigger than the base frequency.

This fact allows the use of a superior bandwidth length and still is able to keep the amount of bits with the graphic memory.

The PCB’s production costs are smaller as a direct consequence.

Hynix GDDR5 Chips

Also another advantage of the GDDR5 memories is that they don’t require tracing circuits of equal length.

Also the fabrication process of the GDDR5 chips allows their operation at supply voltages lower than the GDDR3 chips.

The new GDDR5 chips designed by Hynix are working at a base frequency of 1750MHz using a supply voltage of only 1.35V.

So the energy consumtion for the actual GDDR3 chips is bigger , because they work at a supply voltage of 1.5V.

To reach the 7Ghz bandwidth at a lower voltage of only 1,35 V is due to the fabrication process developed by Hynix that allows them to build chips on 54 nanometers.

The GDDR5 chips presented by Hynix are already standard to JEDEC and they offer a 128MB of storage.

Due to the high frequencies, the new chips are able to reach bandwidth lenght of 224GB/s , using a 256 bits memory interface, and double bandwidth(448 GB/s) if a 512 bits bus is used.

The next generation cores of the graphic cards produced by AMD/Ati or nVidia, may use the new chips GDDR5 built by Hynix.