A report out of Korea claims that Samsung and SK Hynix are gearing up to mass produce second-generation high bandwidth memory for NVIDIA's Pascal graphics processor starting in the first quarter of 2016, the firms are expected to finish pilot production and reliability tests by the end of this year. SK Hynix has already been supplying first-generation high bandwidth memory to both AMD and NVIDIA before Samsung jumped into the fray as well.
High bandwidth memory is basically a high performance RAM interface with DRAM modules stacked up in four layers. Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology enables these stacked memory chips to process data 4 to 8 times faster than conventional DDR memory while consuming up to 40% less power. Second-gen chips are expected to process data twice as fast as their predecessors which were first unveiled by SK Hynix in late 2013, while the storage capable of the 8GB chips is said to have increased fourfold.
