Micron Samples Hybrid Memory Cube With 8x the Transfer Rate of DDR4

From DailyTech: Today, vertical NAND (v-NAND) flash memory is in production and bumping storage densities in mobile devices to new highs. Yet while many players -- including Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) -- are actively producing v-NAND, vertical DRAM -- stacked volatile memory -- remained unsampled until now.

Micron Technologies Inc. (MU) this week announced the industry's first stacked DRAM. While Micron describes the stacked chips as a "hybrid memory cube" (HMC) (also known as vertical DRAM (v-DRAM), the structure appears more like little stacks of poster board on a circuit board.

Each layer features a 4 Gb (Gigabit) die, and there are four layers for a total capacity of 2 GB (Gigabytes) for the stack.

Micron is claiming to get 160 GB/s (Gigabytes per second) of bandwidth for the chip. That's an incredible data transfer rate, compared to the approximately 11 GB/s DDR3 gets and the 21-24 GB/s DDR4 is expected to get. Moreover, the packaging cuts power consumption by 70 percent by reducing the distance signals have to travel between chips.

The Boise, Idaho-based chipmaker sees potential demand for HMC chips in "data packet processing, data packet buffering or storage, and computing applications such as processor accelerators." The latter sounds like the new DRAM could be targeted at graphics processing units (GPUs), among the most memory-hungry components of a modern PC.

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