Rambus Confirms HBM3 Memory To Double Memory Bandwidth To 4Gbps

Rambus has stepped up and revealed some preliminary specifications for the DDR5 and HBM3 memory standards. HBM3 is the successor to HBM2 memory with DDR5 being the successor to DDR4, as if the names didn’t give that fact away. These specs are still in their early stages and could change ahead of the official launch of memory using those specifications.

Even though the specifications are being given out right now, it may a while before products using the specs will land. AMD will continue with HBM2 for GPUs and NVIDIA has no immediate plans to make any shifts. On to the specs, HBM3 will offer twice the performance that is coming from current HBM2 specification.

The move to DDR5 will get somewhere in the range of 1.5x to 2x the performance improvement compared to DDR4. HBM3 will have a transfer rate of 4Gbps/s meaning somewhere around 512GB/s to 1 TB/s final bandwidth per package.

For DDR5 transfer speeds are cited at 4.8 Gbps to 6.4 Gbps. Both of the new standards will be built using a 7nm process helping with power efficiency an increased economy of scale.

Rambus is viewed as a patent troll by some and counts among its licensees Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron along with Qualcomm and NVIDIA. Other licensees include AMD, Intel, and IBM. Way back in 2012, Rambus saw one of the patents invalidated that it was using to try and force NVIDIA into a patent agreement. NVIDIA did, however, eventually license Rambus technology.