GDDR4 - Adoption

Adoption

The memory became available with ATI Technologies' Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon HD 2900 XT and 2600 XT video cards. GDDR4 is intended to achieve clock rates as high as 1.4 GHz (2.8 GBit/s). However, Samsung had aimed to increase GDDR4 to effective clock rates as high as 1.6 GHz (3.2 GBit/s, at higher voltage) and was rumoured to have implemented this improvement into some of the Radeon HD 2900 XT cards.

Graphics cards incorporating GDDR4 memory are now available for purchase with a clock rate of around 1.0 GHz to 1.1 GHz. Samsung was quoted saying they would have 1.6 GHz GDDR4 ready for market as early as July, 2006. NVIDIA was also rumored to have had plans of utilizing the memory on newer revisions of their current-generation GeForce 8-Series GPUs, but instead NVIDIA has used GDDR3 in all of the GeForce 8 cards. Adoption of GDDR4 has been minimal compared to GDDR3 which is still extremely prevalent in most mainstream Graphics cards. Some graphics vendors are adopting DDR3 instead of moving to GDDR4 or 5.

The video memory manufacturer Qimonda (formerly Infineon Memory Products division) has stated it will "skip" the development of GDDR4, and move directly to GDDR5.