Micron confirms its plan to release ultra-fast GDDR7 memory next year

Micron expects to launch GDDR7 memory modules in the first half of 2024

As part of their 2023 earnings report, Micron has confirmed that they plan to release high performance GDDR7 memory modules in the first half of next year, ushering in a new era of memory bandwidth for users. 

While Micron has not confirmed how fast their GDDR7 memory modules will be, Samsung has already revealed plans to release 36 Gbps GDDR7 memory modules, which are 80% faster than the 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory that is used with AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and over 70% faster than the 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory that is used with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090. 

GDDR7 memory support will be one of the highlight features of next-generation graphics cards from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, as GDDR7 will deliver gamers a huge bandwidth upgrade over equivalent GDDR6/GDDR6X based products and give GPU manufacturers an opportunity to deliver a huge generational leap in graphics performance.

Below is what Micron had to say regarding its GDDR7 (G7) memory plans.  

    In graphics, industry analysts continue to expect graphics’ TAM compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to outpace the broader market, supported by applications across client and data center. We expect customer inventories to normalize in calendar Q3. We plan to introduce our next-generation G7 product on our industry-leading 1ß node in the first half of calendar year 2024.

The bandwidth of GDDR6 and GDDR6X memory solutions have become a limiting factor for many modern graphics cards, and both AMD and Nvidia have invested heavily in data caching solutions to allow them to increase the effective bandwidth that is available to their products and mitigate the impact of GDDR6/GDDR6X memory speeds. 

With GDDR7, graphics cards manufacturers will have a lot more memory bandwidth to play with, which will allow them to focus more on compute and less on squeezing every ounce of performance they can from their memory bus and caching solutions. Faster memory is a big deal for the GPU market, and it could allow AMD and Nvidia to deliver larger than normal performance leaps with their next-generation products. 

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