The memory manufacturer SK Hynix has announced during the current edition of GDC 2018 that its new GDDR6 memory will be ready to start mass production within three months at the latest. The bad news is that this new type of memory for graphics cards will be more expensive to produce than GDDR5 when it was first introduced.
The current memory for GDDR5 graphics cards came on the market in 2009. And since 2012 there was already news of what was going to be its successor, GDDR6 memory, which was originally scheduled to hit the market in 2014. It is clear that this prediction was quite optimistic, when we are ending the first quarter of 2018 and mass production of this type of VRAM has not yet begun.
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Even so, the news that comes to us from the GDC 2018 conference is quite encouraging for this type of graphics memory, since the manufacturer SK Hynix has commented that its manufacture is almost ready for mass production within three months, which tells us It would be at the end of June or the beginning of July… Which is when some manufacturers such as AMD Radeon or NVIDIA will, in all probability, begin to renew their current series of graphics cards.
GDDR6 memory will be up to 20% more expensive
One of the main advantages that the new GDDR6 memory will bring is that with them the size of the memory chip will double, which will go from the current 8 Gb to 16 Gb. GB of VRAM memory as the usual option, while the lower ranges will all have 4 GB of memory on their PCBs, instead of the usual 2 GB that we usually see today. The consumption of this memory would remain the same as in the current GDDR5 and 5X, being powered at 1.35 V (GDDR6 is based on DDR4 RAM, while GDDR5 is based on DDR3).
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Where all this good news goes awry is in chip prices. Although we do not know the price that each memory chip will cost for graphics card manufacturers, we do know that this price will increase between 15 and 20% compared to what GDDR5 memory had at the time of its launch. Obviously, as time passes and production and demand stabilize, these prices will come down. But even so, they are prices that graphics card manufacturers will end up passing on to users.
