Next-Gen Nvidia, AMD GPUs to Include 32Gb/s GDDR7 Modules

Over the past year, there have been plenty of rumblings about GDDR7 memory being in development for next-gen GPUs. The collection of rumors culminated in this week's announcement from JEDEC that the spec had been finalized, paving the way for its adoption in future graphics cards. Now, two reliable sources are confirming that GDDR7 is indeed coming to GPUs this year, albeit with somewhat modest specs given what's possible for the all-new memory standard. However, it will still represent a sizable leap forward for GPU memory bandwidth.

News of AMD and Nvidia's memory plans comes from 3Dcenter.org, with additional details confirmed by the Twitter account kopite7kimi, known for insider info on in-development hardware. It's reporting that both companies will adopt GDDR7 modules with 16Gb (2GB) capacity running at 32Gb/s speeds for their debut. The capacity is somewhat of a letdown, as it's the same as GDDR6. But it's a sizable jump in bandwidth: Nvidia's 40-series GPUs now top out at 23Gb/s of GDDR6X, while AMD's 7000-series are at 20Gb/s.

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Nvidia and AMD have gradually nudged this spec up with each generation of cards, with Nvidia going from 19.5Gb/s with the RTX 3090 to 21Gb/s on the RTX 4090, then up to 23Gb/s on the RTX 4080 Super, for example. So, the jump to 32Gb/s is a quantum leap forward in bandwidth. Current cards use 2GB modules, so memory capacities may feature numbers similar to what we're used to. However, as Videocardz notes, JEDEC's specification for GDDR7 calls for 3GB, 4GB, 6GB, and 8GB densities per chip—which will eventually lead to new memory configurations never seen before, such as 18GB for the midrange and possibly 48GB on the high-end. The increase in memory densities could also lead to smaller PCBs in the future.

This is just the starting point for GDDR7. Next-gen GPUs will use the lowest capacity and speed possible to kick things off. However, memory manufacturers all have different roadmaps for GDDR7, with Micron being an outlier with its X-version made for Nvidia. Despite the differences between manufacturers, GDDR7 is expected to hit 36Gb/s around 2026 and climb even further afterward. If you recall, GDDR6 came out in 2018 with Nvidia's Turing 20-series GPUs. It lasted for three generations of GPUs, or about six years in total. We can, therefore, reasonably expect GDDR7 to take us all the way to 2030.