Samsung Mass Producing Most Advanced Graphics Memory: GDDR4

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San Jose, CA – July 5, 2006: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology and the leading producer of high-end graphics memory, announced today that it has begun mass producing the world’s fastest graphics memory, GDDR4 (series four of graphics double-density-rate memory), which processes images 33 percent faster than the fastest memory on the market today. Graphics memory is installed in desktop PCs, notebooks and workstations to move huge volumes of video images simultaneously.

“Thanks to GDDR4-based systems, the quality of DVD movies today will improve to have life-like movements and richly textured imagery,” said Gerd Schauss, Marketing Director, Memory Products at Samsung Semiconductor Europe”. Using 80-nanometer production technology, the memory has an ultra-high-speed data processing rate of 2,4 Gigabits per second (Gbps).”

Samsung has dramatically increased the performance of GDDR4 while reducing power consumption on a performance equivalency basis. When measured against GDDR3 at the highest comparable speed (2.0Gb/s), GDDR4 showed a 45 percent power savings. The 512Mb GDDR4 memory will be offered in a 32-bit data bus configuration.

GDDR4 uses JEDEC-approved standards for signal noise reduction, including data bus inversion and multi-preamble specifications, to help attain the highest possible speed.

Manufacturers of graphics processing units (GPUs) and video cards have expressed strong interest in the new memory.

“NVIDIA worked with JEDEC to develop the GDDR4 standard and we are excited to see Samsung ramping this into production,” said Tony Tamasi, vice president of technical marketing at NVIDIA. “The graphics industry has an insatiable demand for high bandwidth memories and GDDR4 is poised to become the next major evolutionary step for our GPUs.”

“We’re delighted that we’ll be able to use GDDR4 from Samsung in our latest graphics cards,” said Joe Macri, senior director of engineering, ATI, and chair of the JEDEC committee on GDDR4. “Samsung’s timely introduction will increase the performance of our upcoming products and ultimately improve the gaming experience for our users”.

According to Dr. Jon Peddie of the market research firm Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, CA, “Sales of high performance memory have already risen by 15% this year compared to 2005, and GDDR4 will give an even sharper boost in demand.” His firm projected that the non-integrated graphics memory market will grow from $2.3 billion in 2005 to over US$4 billion by the end of 2008.