Rambus Unveils GDDR7 Memory Controller IP: PAM3 Signaling, Up To 48 Gbps Data Rates, 192 GB/s Bandwidth

Rambus has unveiled its next-gen GDDR7 memory controller IP, featuring PAM3 Signaling, and up to 48 Gbps transfer speeds.

Press Release: As the latest addition to the Rambus portfolio of industry-leading interface and security digital IP for AI 2.0, the GDDR7 memory controller will provide the breakthrough memory throughput required by servers and clients in the next wave of AI inference.

The output of the AI 2.0 training process is an inference model that can be employed to create new multimodal content from a user’s prompts. Since accuracy and fidelity increase with model size, there is an ongoing push for larger and larger inference models. As AI inference becomes increasingly pervasive and moves out from the data center to the edge and endpoints, it drives the need for more powerful processing engines with tailored high-performance memory solutions across the entire computing landscape.

GPUs have been the inference engines of choice, and in the case of edge and endpoint applications, such as servers and desktops, these have been GPUs using GDDR6 memory. GDDR6, however, has reached the practical limit of standard NRZ signaling at 24 Gigabits per second (Gbps) data rates. To meet the bandwidth needs of future GPUs, a new generation of GDDR using a new signaling scheme is required. Enter GDDR7 memory which using PAM3 signaling can boost data rates to 40 Gbps and higher.

GDDR, now at the GDDR7 specification level, is today a state-of-the-art graphics memory solution with a performance roadmap of up to 48 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and memory throughput of 192 GB/s per GDDR7 memory device.

On the critical parameter of bandwidth, GDDR7 memory really shines. At a data rate of 32 Gbps, and a 32-bit wide interface, a GDDR7 device can deliver 128 GB/s of memory bandwidth, more than double that of any of the alternative solutions. GDDR7 memory offers the best speed, bandwidth and latency performance for AI inference.

Rambus

As the preferred silicon IP supplier for AI 2.0, Rambus offers industry-leading HBM, PCIe, and CXL Controller IP and is now the industry’s first GDDR7 Memory Controller IP. The Rambus GDDR7 Controller provides a full-featured, bandwidth-efficient solution for GDDR7 implementations. It supports 40 Gbps operation providing 160 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) throughput for a GDDR7 memory device, a 67% increase over the industry’s highest throughput GDDR6 Controller (also from Rambus).

The Rambus GDDR7 Controller enables a new generation of GDDR memory deployments for cutting-edge AI accelerators, graphics, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

“GDDR7 memory offers significant performance gains over GDDR6,” said Soo-Kyoum Kim, vice president, memory semiconductors at IDC. “The Rambus GDDR7 Controller IP solution will be a vital tool for anyone that wants to take advantage of the improved speed and latency features offered by GDDR7.”

Rambus GDDR7 Controller key features: