Samsung Electronics just announced that the company’s GDDR7 memory modules would utilize Pulse-Amplitude Modulation signaling (PAM3), with an increased power efficiency of twenty-five percent and the same percentage above Non-Return to Zero signaling (NRZ) that is utilized in GDDR6 memory.
Samsung officially confirms PAM3 signaling for GDDR7 Memory, showing a more significant improvement over NRZ and PAM4 by 25%
Last year, Intel executive Gregory M. Bryant traveled to the Intel Israeli Research and Development facilities and posted images of his trip to Twitter. During the visit, Bryant accidentally leaked an image that displayed information about Thunderbolt 5 technology which had yet to be released. Once the executive realized his mistake, the picture was deleted from the post but had described some pertinent developments, namely PAM3 signaling (GDDR7).
Image source: Samsung via Dr. Ian Cutress.
To sum up, PAM3 signaling on GDDR7 is how a system generates zeros and ones on a single bit. When the tweet was posted, the industry standard was PAM4 and NRZ. The numbers three and four are the number of zero and one variations (00, 01,10, and 11) transmitted to the NRZ and PAM4. In PAM 3 signaling, the numeric values are split between negative and positive ones and zero (-1, 0, and +1). At the time, PAM3 memory technology was efficiently better than PAM4 but fell short of NRZ. This has now changed, and PAM3 will be the new standard.
Samsung continued to confirm that the bandwidth supported by the new GDDR7 memory will be running at a transfer rate of 36 Gbps. Compared to the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, the bandwidth is now two times faster than the chips used on the GPU series, which were topping at 18 Gbps. The new GDDR7 is also faster than the AMD Radeon 7000 GPU series.
There are currently no product releases that will utilize the Samsung GDDR7 memory modules, and Samsung Electronics has yet to reveal dates for when it will be implemented into graphics cards. However, we should expect that the new standard will produce 1152 GB/s of memory bandwidth across a 256-bit memory bus, while when used with 384-bit memory controllers produce 1728 GB/s. Samsung also recently announced its GDDR6W memory which features double the capacity and channels versus GDDR6.
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