In an interesting observation, it has come to light that AMD's soon to be released ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 MXM modules will carry the industry's fastest 5 GT/s GDDR5 memory chips made by Qimonda. From the part name on the chips, IDGV1G-05A1F1C-50X. One can infer "50X" to be the bandwidth per pin at reference speeds: 5 GT/s (5 GB/s in one direction). Across the 128-bit wide memory bus the M97 HD 4860 has, the chips can churn-out a staggering 80 GB/s memory bandwidth, never before seen on any mGPU board. In comparison, NVIDIA's G92b-based GeForce GTX 280M delivers 60.08 GB/s and AMD's own M98 RV770-based Mobility Radeon HD 4850 doles-out 56.8 GB/s.
The 5 GT/s GDDR5 chips are yet to be used by AMD in its desktop products. Development cycles have gone as far as including "40X" (4 GT/s) memory chips labeled IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X on company-internal RV790 samples. Another DRAM major, Hynix had announced its plans to introduce 7 GT/s GDDR5 chips back in November 2008. The company is known to commence volume production of the 7 GT/s chip by the end of Q2 2009.
13 Comments on ATI M97 Already Using 5 GT/s GDDR5 Memory, Highest Memory Bandwidth for Any mGPU
That would be sweet.
And I should know - Ive been burned by all of that very underhanded marketing on a few processors before (And YES their theoretical bandwidth WAS better, but they still performed worse).
Effective mathematical bandwidth does NOT ALWAYS translate into performance (And can even AGGRAVATE pre-existing bottlenecks, creating buffer overruns that can actually cause entire transfer cycles to drop).
Don't get me wrong, in GFX processing , bandwidth is vital to taking full advantage of a GPU. This does indeed LOOK like good news on the surface, but I'm going to wait for the benchmarks before I begin swishing my credit-card around...
If ATI/AMD can keep this up it will mean great news for us consumers.
Check that review out ppl.