Hynix Semiconductor, South Korea's second largest memory chip maker, has launched the speediest memory chip aimed at game consoles and PC graphics cards available so far.
The graphics double data rate 4 (GDDR4) chips are high bandwidth DRAM memory able to process heavy volumes of gaming and video images far faster than normal PC memory chips. They're a step up from
the GDDR3 generation of chips currently used on the highest performing graphics cards today. Hynix said its GDDR4 chips are also ideal for 64-bit computing.
The company on Sunday announced the availability of a 512-megabit density GDDR4, an ultra high speed memory chip that Hynix says improves data processing speed by close to two times over GDDR3.
Hynix's GDDR4 chips operate at 2.9 gigabits per second and can process 11.6GB of data in one second, the company says. It will begin shipping samples to customers soon and plans to start mass production of the chips in early 2006. By the second half of next year, the company says it will improve the speed of the chips to 14.4GB.
The fastest graphics memory chips had been limited to a speed of just 1.6 gigabits per second before the launch of GDDR4.
