GDDR2 Emerging As A Real Standard

An anonymous reader writes "I noticed here that EE Times is reporting that the GDDR2 standard is finally becoming a reality. Both NVIDIA and ATI's latest chips offer support. ATI helped spearhead the initiative to develop the standard. The significance of this is great, since it may very well mean that every 18 months or so a new graphics memory standard will be released."

Comments

last I remembered

[lingqi]

the special requirement of graphics specific RAM is the simultaneous in/out access. (At least that's my understanding of VRAM (video RAM))

For that point, why arn't they doing a QDR architecture? QDR is basically DDR but with dedicated in / out pins (separate) that allows this kind of simultaneous read/write.

Granted, pin count is higher but I think it would be better suited to the graphics people.

That or I am not quite clear on the GDDR-n specs. heh. Or I am thinking about frame-buffer memory instead of texture memory (AFAIK the latter only need to be continuously read, really fast) hmm...

Re:last I remembered

[videodriverguy]

VRAM was a dual port RAM, with an output only port and a standard I/O port. The output port was used to refresh the screen, since it could produce data independantly from the I/O port.

However, with the bus widths being used by GPUs today (128,256), they really don't fit anymore. GPUs now manage the RAM accesses so that frame buffer access is shared with drawing etc. This means that the most important thing is RAM speed - with accesses for the frame buffer being sequential, the less time taken for that the more memory bandwidth left for drawing.

This will become even more important once we have the very high resolution monitors (LCD) on the horizon - 3K x 2K pixel displays will require a LOT of memory bandwidth to keep them refreshed.

Re:I'm sorry...

[Doppler00]

Probably because it's engineers and not marketing people naming these things because it's being sold to other firms to be included in there products. I guess Engineers prefer unintelligable acronyms to cool names like GeForce or Radeon.

GDDR2 SDRAM really means -> Graphics Double Data Rate 2 Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory

GDDR3!

[nrdlnd]

The good news in the article is that the much "better" memory GDDR3 will be standardized from the beginning with may suppliers and hopefully a lower price. Forget GDDR2!

Re:GDDR2?

[EinarH]

It's hard to find any technical description since its pretty new and there is no JDEC-standard yet.

But the key that makes it worth the extra bucks is the fact that DDR-II delivers twice the external bandwidth of a standard DDR solution for the same internal frequency. The 1.8-volt device features a high-speed data transfer rate of 533Mbps that can be extended to 667Mbps for networks and special system environments.

The last year chip-makers have released diffrent DDR chips with increasing frequency like DDR 266, DDR333 and DDR400. But its limited how much higher its possible to go so instead they are trying to add another sort of "bus" inside the chip.

The reason they started producing DDR (vs. SDR) is because it's much easier to implement such a double data rate (DDR) bus than it is to actually double the clock rate of a bus. So DDR allows you to instantly double a bus's peak bandwidth without all the hassle and expense of a higher frequency bus.

DDR-II is made thinking in the same way.