Recent advances in artificial intelligence may appear revolutionary, but JEDEC is keeping an evolutionary approach for Graphics Double Data Rate (GDDR) standards, even as it's being increasingly used for AI applications.
www.eetimes.com/, May. 13, 2024 –
In a briefing with EE Times, Michael Litt, chair of the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association's GDDR subcommittee, said the GDDR7 standard continues the generation-to-generation tradition of double the bandwidth and double the capacity while keeping a lid on power consumption. "We did look at evolutionary and revolutionary approaches," he said. "That's always the first thing we do."
Litt said the path JEDEC chooses is heavily influenced by industry participants.
"We were looking to really maintain an evolutionary approach," he said. "We have to support the markets that it supports today." Graphics and gaming continue to be important segments for GDDR7, as well as increased use by AI applications, he said.
Even if a revolutionary jump ahead is possible, the industry would not likely be able to take advantage of it. In the meantime, Litt said, there have been walls that needed to be overcome as GDDR has evolved, including scaling the interface. "The success of JEDEC specs is they don't try to bite off more than they can chew," he said. "We try to stay as evolutionary as possible."
The latest iteration of GDDR offers twice the bandwidth of its predecessor, reaching up to 192 GB/s per device. GDDR7 doubles the number of independent channels, from two in GDDR6 to four.
GDDR adds PAM
It's also the first JEDEC standard DRAM to use the pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) interface for high-frequency operations. Using a PAM3 interface improves the signal-to-noise ratio for high-frequency operation while enhancing energy efficiency. PAM3 also offers a higher data transmission rate per cycle, resulting in improved performance versus the traditional non-return-to-zero (NRZ) interface.