It looks like GDDR2 memory starts gaining its popularity as Samsung Electronics today announced production of its 256Mb Graphics Double Data Rate2 (GDDR2) SDRAM. The 256Mb capacity will enable building graphics cards with up to 512MB of memory using PCBs of typical sizes. Besides, the 1600MHz DRAM chips will allow extremely fast graphics cards.

Samsung claims that the new devices had already been supplied to leading graphics card manufacturers, suggesting that the actual products with such amazing memory are not too far away. I believe that we will hardly see any graphics cards with 512MB of mind-blowing fast memory in late 2003 or early 2004, but a year from now there definitely will be high-end graphics products with 512MB of memory. Such graphics cards may be based on the successors of the NV40 and R420 designs, for example.

Samsung’s GDDR2 devices incorporate a number of new technical features, such as On-Die-Termination (ODT), Off-Chip driver-Calibration (OCD) and posted CAS to boost performance by up to 50% over graphics DDR SDRAM.

GDDR2 SDRAM at 1600MHz in 128-bit configuration is capable of providing of up to 25.6GB/s peak bandwidth, while in 256-bit configurations, the new type of memory will bring up to astonishing 51.2GB/s of throughput.

Samsung has introduced GDDR2 SDRAM ahead of competition by developing the industry’s first 1000MHz 128Mb GDDR2 SDRAM in July 2002. The chips were adopted by NVIDIA Corporation in its unsuccessful GeForce FX 5800 graphics product. Samsung’s full-scale production of the next generation graphics DDR SDRAM in the second half of 2003 will further accelerate its advanced graphics memory business.