One of the biggest problems with video memory is its high power consumption when transmitting data, as it has bandwidths as high as conventional RAM, however, every bit transmitted between the VRAM and the GPU consumes it. for example, the energy consumption is therefore much higher.
And it is that in a graphics card not only the GPU consumes power, but also VRAM and with the recent announcement that PCI Express graphics cards can have a consumption that can range from 450 W to 600 W, the ban opens not only to sell graphics cards faster in processing, but also in memory.
The new GDDR6 24 Gbit / s
GDDR6 memory chips referenced with speeds of 20 Gbps and 24 Gbps have appeared in the Samsung catalog. This translates to 25% and 50% higher bandwidth than the current version of the sixth generation graphics DDR, 16 Gbps, and faster than the GDDR6X used by NVIDIA.
Let’s not forget that GDDR6X is a variant of GDDR6 which uses PAM-4 encoding to reduce memory clock speed and with it consumption, so newer modules will have more power consumption. higher than the current ones. Which leads us to think of this as a way to take advantage of the new 12 pin power connector. In other words, everything indicates that we will see them in the high end of NVIDIA and AMD.
The big question in all of this is NVIDIA, mainly due to the fact that the RTX 3090 Ti is already ready and everything indicates, due to the leaked specs, that it could carry GDDR6X with a capacity of 2GB per chip, but maybe- being these green surprises us at CES. As for AMD this is another issue, they never went for GDDR6X and therefore 20 or 24 Gbps GDDR6 should be used in RX 7000 with RDNA 3 architecture.
What about GDDR6X?
With GDDR6 at higher clock speeds than GDDR6X, the answer to the question is very clear. So the situation is very similar to that of the GDDR5X in its time, which many of you will surely have forgotten, however, that it is in the GeForce GTX 1080 as VRAM. Out of curiosity, part of his improvements concerned the creation of GDDR6.
More often than not, GDDR6X will eventually be replaced by faster GDDR6. After all, this is a component for exclusive use in high-end RTX 30s and is not part of the JEDEC standard. It has had its use in being able to grant bandwidths that could not be achieved today with standard VRAM and has been the key to the performance of the latest NVIDIA graphics cards.
The GDDR6X therefore more than fulfilled its objective, since the use of GDDR6 would have been negative for the performance of the RTX 3080 and more powerful.
