Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), said Thursday that it had begun to ship GDDR4 memory chips for ATI Radeon HD 2600- and 2900-series graphics cards. Originally ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, did not announce ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards with GDDR4 memory.

“We chose Samsung’s GDDR4 memory for our 1GB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards because its design complements our strategy in offering leading-edge technology to a broader enthusiast gaming market. We’re committed to working with key players in the industry like Samsung to develop advancements that work to continuously improve past solutions.” said Vijay Sharma, director of product marketing, AMD graphics products group.

Samsung’s GDDR4 chips have 512Mb capacity and can operate at up to 2200MHz, which enables 140.8GB/s peak memory bandwidth in case of Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB graphics card.

It is interesting to note that earlier sources close to Advanced Micro Devices did not expect the 1GB version of ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card to become a mass product officially advertised by AMD, but the company still decided to publicly talk about it. Still, the destiny of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB may be similar to that of ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB, which never became popular.

Samsung’s GDDR4 memory devices are now in mass production at the 512Mb density level. Samsung started to produce first GDDR4 device last year and submitted a paper on a 4Gbps GDDR4 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) earlier this year.