Samsung to Produce Faster Graphics Memory 138
Samsung has announced a new line of GDDR5 chips that will supposedly be able to deliver data at speeds of up to 6 Gbps. In addition to faster data delivery the new chips also claim to consume less energy than previous versions. "Samsung said the new chips consume 1.5 volts, making them about 20 percent more efficient than GDDR 3 chips. Samples of the GDDR 5 chips began shipping to graphics-processor makers last month, and Samsung plans to begin mass production of the chips during the first half of next year. GDDR 5 memory should first appear in high-end gaming systems where users are willing to pay a premium for better graphics. Samsung did not disclose pricing for the chips.
Fuck Everything, We're Doing GDDR5 (Score:5, Funny)
To: All Samsung Employees
CEO and President,
Samsung
December 3rd, 2007
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of graphics memory in this country. Samsung's GDDR3 was on the card to own. Then the other guy came out with a GDDR3 graphics chip. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called XDR. That's GDDR3 on crack. For cokehead gamers. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to GDDR4. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling XDR & GDDR3. Cokehead gamers or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to GDDR5.
Sure, we could go to GDDR4 next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a more crackhead gamer RAM and call it the XDR3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the speed in the memory game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Samsung is the best a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If GDDR2 is good, and three is better, obviously five would make us the best fucking memory that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the memory game by clinging to the GDDR2 industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, GDDR5 is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick enough transistors on there to call it GDDR5. I don't care how. Make the chips so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to make the ram hang halfway off the motherboard, just do it!
You're taking the "safety" part of "safety electronics" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make memory history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that GDDR5 can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the GDDR5 card becomes the gaming video card for the U.S. of "this is how we game now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Sony, working on fucking electrics. Cell processing chips, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in SanDisk's wake and make flash USB drives. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like SanDisk is the day I leave the silicon game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than GDDR5 is like playing Warcraft on a Commodore 64." Or "It'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your monitor." Try "Your frame rate is going to be so friggin' fluid, someone's gonna walk up and confuse it with a urinal."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Samsung is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, GDDR5, sweet Jesus in heaven.
Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another microcontroller on that fucker, too. That's right. GDDR5, two microcontroll
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Re:Fuck Everything, We're Doing GDDR5 (Score:4, Informative)
Article [theonion.com]. He missed a few words, but it was good.
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http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [theonion.com]
Note to self (Score:1)
Seems like execs keep getting burned this way.
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http://sites.gizoogle.com/index2.php?url=http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [gizoogle.com]
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"Hey, shaving with anything less than GDDR5 is like playing Warcraft on a Commodore 64."
Does it imply that playing games with less than 5 blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet?
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Yeah, I get your drift! Things like vibrant culture, better international relations, stronger economy, a population who aren't assholes, less prejudice, etc, etc. Oh wait, these can all be helped by imm
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You do have a newsletter i could subscribe to, right?
Qimonda (Score:5, Informative)
Consumes 1.5 Volts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Consumes 1.5 Volts? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn... I logged on just to respond to this. "Consuming Volts", "travelling at 5 knots per hour", "uses 4 kW per hour" and similar flagrant misuse of units really winds my shorts (to a torque of 5 Nm). You can forgive USA Today, but a Geek rag should get this right.
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Re: Simple proof... (Score:1)
Now move the red lead to the other power lead on the chip - Zero volts coming out! Where are these volts going? But it not accurate to say they are being *consumed* per se. The volts are stored in the form of magic smoke. When the chip is full of volts (as magic smoke), it stops working. Be careful, too many volts going in and you can burst the smoke tank, then you're really screw
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-nB
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the same way bits are more than bytes:
"Called GDDR (Graphics Double Data Rate) 5, the new chips can transfer data at speeds up to 6G bps (bits per second)....GDDR5 is able to move more data, up to 24G bytes per second..."
so apparently it can move 6G bits per second, but if it really feels up to it, it can kick it up a notch and move 24G bytes per second (8 bits in 1 byte = 192G bits per second).
Comprende?
Something tells me the author can't tell his volt from his watt o
Re:Consumes 1.5 Volts? (Score:5, Informative)
Really, your statement is worse than not inaccurate, it's the opposite of accurate. Devices that use lower voltage tend to have higher currents (for the same function/efficiency.) Although the overall power tends to be lower, it's not as much lower as it would be if V were reduced and current were unchanged. Were this not true, you'd see power consumption for a line of devices fall with the square of their voltages. Of course this is not the case, since 1.5V devices don't tend to consume less than 1% of similar-function 5V devices. (Part of the reason is that lower voltage requires thinner gate dielectrics, which increases leakage current, and the smaller features of lower-voltage devices include thinner wires, with more resistance, which require more current for the same performance.)
That did drive me nuts, of course, because it was so wrong. Yet, the use of g/mil^2 to measure mass per area (grams per (0.001 x 0.001) inches.) doesn't bother me at all.
In short, everything you said is wrong.
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Did you just make that up?
Relax, I'm just fuckin' with ya, in the spirit of Christmas. Yeah, I pretty much made that up.
But there is some truth to it, especially when comparing two very similar chips. I suspect it is just Samsung's attempt at keeping up with Intel's "low voltage" talk. Do a search on Google for "low voltage" and you will see all of the marketing fun.
I love the g/mil^2. First you have the substitution of grams for Newtons. Then you have the "metrification" of the standard units. And finally, you combine SI and stand
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Voltage has no impact on resistance.
Let me introduce you to my friend, Diode.
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Lower voltage is only good for battery devices.
In a desktop it doesnt matter and having a higher voltage using less amps is better.
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They should have said "opperate at 1.5 volts".
That said: there are so many other factors invovled (not the least of which being frequency and feature size), saying "lower voltage equals lower resistance equals less power consumed" is, at best, as misleading as the original statement.
Finally, let me point out that the most common unit for for measuring pressures is a length. How's tha
Re:Consumes 1.5 Volts? (Score:5, Funny)
I think they should measure chip power consumption in Libraries Of Congress. As in, the chip consumes just 1/127372839 of a Library of Congress.
African, or European Congress? (Score:2)
If we're really talking LOC's we need rules! (Score:2)
1 LOC == Negative Square Root of knots traveled times the volts of energy in one cubic ounce of free hydrogen.
Further, LOCs decrease in both mass and energy as square of the distance from any funding source.
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Inaccurate summary (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Informative)
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Rumors (Score:5, Interesting)
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So the main question is (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:So the main question is (Score:5, Funny)
No further comment.
Re:So the main question is (Score:4, Informative)
Consuming Volts? How about actual Wattage please? (Score:5, Informative)
What poor science reporting. Nothing "consumes volts." Volts measure voltage -- difference in potential. Devices consume Joules -- units of energy. Also acceptable would be Watts -- energy per unit time. It would have been really nice to be given the Watts per Bandwidth per Size (W/Gbps/bits), but I realize that's asking way too much of the Times.
Re:Consuming Volts? How about actual Wattage pleas (Score:2, Funny)
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What a terrible pun.
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No no, you misunderstand. The author of the article meant that this chip can eat one standard AA battery. After that, it gets full.
*Results may vary for AAA, C, and D batteries. B batteries are only a myth, anyone who believes in them probably also believes that P=IE is some EE's recipe for a tasty tart.
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The sizes today don't just dictate form, they also tell you other characteristics such as voltages.
no, the problem with volts is not the science (Score:5, Informative)
What the article failed to explain is this long history of voltage serving as a proxy for power efficiency.
The other relationship is that a given part will usually demonstrate a relationship where lower frequencies are stable at lower voltages. If increasing the voltage by 20% allows you to overclock a processor from 2GHz to 3GHz, you can estimate your increased power draw as 1.2^2 * 1.5, about double where you started.
It's almost pointless to convert this measure into watts, as so many other variables change in tandem. The new part has different bandwidth, different latency, different leakage, different dynamic consumption. There's no simple number that gets you apples vs apples. Most of the time, however, voltage is fair proxy. Peak consumption figures are mostly worthless from an efficiency perspective, except for sizing your power and cooling requirements.
On a side note, I'm wondering when we hit the floor on practical CMOS voltage levels. Surely the band-gap will come into play in the near future, and then what? Does the efficiency graph suddenly develop a crimp and stagger forward on a much reduced slope? This happened with hard drives, where there was a period of accelerated capacity increase (PRML/GMR/pixie-dust era) only to return to the more sedate curve once again later on. It wasn't long ago that F hit thin air (due to thermal issues) and now F is increasing at half the rate it sustained for a least a decade prior.
Long ago apparently respectable sources used to proclaim "silicon will hit the brick wall at 0.1um". In turns out S-curves hardly ever play out that way. The curve begins to taper downward when the easy gains are exhausted. The phrase "peak oil" is another one of those conceptual nightmares, much like the chimeric brick-wall on photo lithography. It's not going to be a peak, is it? It's going to be a wavy plateau. On any particular graph, you can point to a "peak" (though none of the graphs will agree), it's just that there won't be a momentous Alderan-disturbance that ripples though planet earth as the precocious metaphor suggests. Much like the silicon people had to finally confess, driving F higher and higher as your primary performance metric (at the cost of absolute efficiency) makes about as much sense in the long run as a single-occupancy air-conditioned Hummer in rush hour traffic.
Speaking of which, engine displacement is roughly as fair as a measure in the automotive sector as voltage in silicon. It's the nature of the internal combustion engine that these engines are far from their peak efficiency at low to medium throttle, which is why having a lot of power you rarely use is no free lunch. If you accept that a typical 2 liter engine is more efficient than a typical 3 liter engine, why would voltage as a proxy for power be any different?
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Why does it have to be just one "simple" number? How about
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On a side note, I'm wondering when we hit the floor on practical CMOS voltage levels. Surely the band-gap will come into play in the near future, and then what?
Actually (IIRC) you start to get into trouble at about 1V as you hit problems getting the signal off the chip. On the other hand, if they can run different parts of the chip at different voltage levels, they may be able to reduce things quite a bit further. That would probably require a redesign of the motherboard/memory interface though, since putting power regulators on the memory modules seems like a poor idea to me, so that may be a while coming.
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Re:Consuming Volts? How about actual Wattage pleas (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Consuming Volts? How about actual Wattage pleas (Score:5, Informative)
Of course this analysis is purely approximate since there are a lot of there things going in the devices. And I'm assuming complete capacitive discharge (independent of switching frequency), and didn't consider the changes in refresh rate to this DRAM device. But suffice it to say voltage is still a pretty good metric for comparison (until you actually build the thing and test it).
Informative? Where are the EE's in slashdot? (Score:2)
Oh right, I'm an EE.
The difference is we are talking about semiconductor devices. Losses from these semiconductor devices are primarily due to leakage and switching.
Ok. That really doesn't change anything.
As long as we're still using silicon, leakage will be roughly 0.5 V^2/R, no matter how much current you pump through the transistors.
What the hell do you mean, 'no matter how much current you pump through the transistors?' You gave me R for a reason. Here's where your formula comes from: P = V*I, I=V/R, transistor is only on 50% of the time (50% duty cycle). 0.5 * V * (V/R). I don't know R for that memory chip, nor do I know the current, so I don't know the power loss.
The power lost here is roughly 0.5 f C V^2, where f is the switching frequency and C is the capacitance (material dependent).
That comes from the reactive power, and it's actually 0.5 * 2*pi * f * C * V^2. The impedance of
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First of all context is everything. If I say that this line is at 5V, then someone in the power field of EE would think there was really 7.07 V (peak) on it since they alway deal with RMS. Different fields can make different assumptions: in the digital field I can roughly assume that the voltage in my circuits is in 1 of two states (well mostly [wikipedia.org]).
The leakage losses occur because si
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If "everybody" knows the effective R for every different device then why don't you go ahead and tell it to us so we can calculate the power for this device?
(I'm also an EE, this is my area, and you're oversimplifying to the point of error, as has been explained many times to you and elsewhere in this thread.)
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Absolutely. For one, dynamic memories are quite different from microprocessors. We can figure that there will be GDDR interface logic active the whole time, but that power consumption probably pales in comparison to the rest of the chip, with data coming in and out at gigabit speeds. The capacitors used for storage will be drained and filled with every read cycle -- but only one row/column will be acti
Re:Consuming Volts? How about actual Wattage pleas (Score:4, Informative)
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The reason that you see a trend to lower and lower voltages is not because lower voltage = lower power. It's because in order to make transistors faster, you generally want to make them smaller (less area
Not to rain on everybody's parade.. (Score:1)
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Incidently, I found reading about Colossus, and it's older hardware, more interesting.
Quick survey (Score:2)
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The GTX and Ultra are still faster than the GT. Just not by enough to make the extra $300 worth it.
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But now with my new system, I do intend to upgrade graphics card every 2 year or so. I won't get the latest and greatest though, thats usually not worth it. Its often just factory overclocked cards anyways.
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I'm not a hard core gamer though.
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But as for keeping up with the latest gaming performance GPU, that's not much of a concern (hence why I go for the lower 3800 series card). I would even go with a 2600 if not for the poor reviews on HDTV upscaling, noise-reduction, sharpness etc. But as far as games go, I play the Descent series, the Tomb Raider series, and
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Cards of the same generation often use the same meomory tech across the entire price range. All GeForce 8xxx cards use GDDR3, for example. Even when this is not the case (GeForce 7 used both GDDR2 and GDDR3), at the speed graphics tech moves, high-end tech tends to trickle down to the mid-range in less than a year, so it's still interesting for more frugal readers.
What about Latency? (Score:2)
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Samsung has announced a new line of chimps (Score:1)
GDDR4 (Score:1)
I Have a Question... (Score:1)
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Only when GPU manufacturers start to worry about efficiency do I figure we'll start seeing prettier dies... And graphics cards that don't consume hundreds of watts.
Reminds me of a commercial (Score:2)
This was almost as good as the one where one of those ionic air f
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Why we should care about a semiconductor operating on 1.5 volts versus 2.0 volts, I am not sure. We certainly cannot estimate how long it will run on a battery, or how much we will have to pay the power company with voltage being the only metric given to us.
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Which is why peak power (calculated as voltage * peak current) is usually reported. Not really much of an issue, since who cares about minimum current/power or how each exactly change over time? I guess average may be nice, but peak is the best. And voltage is useless without some measure of current also, as you mention in the latter half of your post.
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This is only loosely related but reflects one of my peeves. This is why a measure of HP is equally worthless without a torque curve. So many "motor heads" are clueless as to why this matters and get hung up on HPx > HPy.
Take a look at Ford's Mustang. When they changed from 5.0 to 4.6 liter, the HP rating went up but the car got slower. Why? HP = torque*RPM. It takes the 4.6 longer (lower torque) to develop peak HP, and by the time it is, the race
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A small bike might be 65HP and 40ftlb and might typically top out at around 120mph. And 0-60 in like 6 seconds. That's how riders think because my idea of a "small bike" is going to perform dram
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I = C * dV/dT
Duhm summaries (Score:2)
The only slight mitigation here is that P = V^2/R, or I = V/R so reducing voltage reduces current too. Of course that does make TFS accurate.
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I'm thinking that was not written by an EE (or anybody else that commonly speaks about electronics and efficiency.) I would suppose they operate at 1.5 volts and consume some number of amps.
If you're going to be pedantic, don't talk about "consuming amps." The current flowing into the circuit from power is exactly the same as the current flowing out of the circuit to ground (otherwise, the circuit would be building up a charge). Where exactly does this current get "consumed?" It doesn't. What gets consu
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My RAM runs in 42km^2Kjbps
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Did I mention that the underground 7200 volt feeder had lightning damaged insulation?
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As for me, I'm an EE so I'm qualified to talk about anything that matters
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