Today Samsun Electronics Co., Ltd. announced that it has begun mass production of its 2nd-generation 8GB High Bandwidth Memory-2 (HBM2). The new product, Aquabolt, is claimed to be the fastest data transmission speed on the market with 2.4 Gbps data transfer speed per pin. This would make it ideal for supercomputing and graphic rich applications.
Today Samsun Electronics Co., Ltd. announced that it has begun mass production of its 2nd-generation 8GB High Bandwidth Memory-2 (HBM2). The new product, Aquabolt, is claimed to be the fastest data transmission speed on the market with 2.4 Gbps data transfer speed per pin. This would make it ideal for supercomputing and graphic rich applications.
The improvement in performance is 50% per package over the previous generation’s performance. With a single package, the new HBM2 will be able to hit 307GB/s data bandwidth. According to Samsung, that would make Aquabolt 9.6 times faster than an 8Gb GDDR5 chip. Four new HBM2 packages enable a 1.2TBps bandwidth potentially improving a system by 50%.
In order to hit this level of performance in Aquabolt, Samsung used new TSV technology and thermal control. According to the company, a single 8GB HBM2 package consists of eight 8Gb HBM2 dies, which are vertically interconnected using over 5,000 TSVs (Through Silicon Via’s) per die. While using so many TSVs can cause collateral clock skew, Samsung succeeded in minimizing the skew to a very modest level and significantly enhancing chip performance in the process. Samsung has added additional thermal bumps between dies for better control as well as a protective layer on the bottom of the device.
Availability
Samsung will supply the new HBM2 to its customers and OEM partners soon.
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