AI Fuels Next-Gen HBM Demand EE Times

High bandwidth memory gained some momentum last week as Samsung Electronics announced it started mass production of its second-generation technology, dubbed Aquabolt. Designed for use with next-gen supercomputers, artificial intelligence (AI) and graphics systems, Tien Shiah, product marketing manager for High Bandwidth Memory at Samsung, said the 8 GB High Bandwidth Memory-2 (HBM2) offers the highest DRAM performance levels and the fastest data transmission rates available today with a 2.4 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) data transfer speed per pin at 1.2V. That's nearly a 50 percent performance improvement per package, he said, compared with Samsung's previous generation HBM2 package, Flarebolt, with its 1.6Gbps pin speed at 1.2V and 2.0Gbps at 1.35V. In a telephone interview with EE Times from CES, Shiah said a single Aquabolt package will offer a 307GBps data bandwidth, achieving 9.6 times faster data transmission than an 8Gb GDDR5 chip, which provides a 32GBps data bandwidth. This means using four packages in a system will enable a 1.2 terabytes-per-second (TBps) bandwidth, he said, hence the overall system performance by as much as 50 percent.