Samsung Starts Mass Producing Next-Gen Chips News

Samsung Electronics has crossed the finishing post in the race to begin the mass production of 512-megabit DDR3 graphics chips, according to global news organisation, Reuters. The chips, which have been developed for use in the next-generation consoles and PCs, run at 1.6-gigabits but when several of them are brought together onto a graphics card they can achieve speeds of up to 6.4 gigabytes.

The announcement means that Samsung has taken the lead in the race to supply the graphics memory for the next-generation consoles, but speaking to Reuters, Dean McCaron an analyst for Mercury Research said that with the first of the machines still months away from launch, there is still time for Samsungâ??s competitors to catch up.

In addition, Samsung also announced that theyâ??ve started work on the successor to the DDR3 called GDDR3 (graphics double data rate 3), which would run at speeds of 2.0 gigabit per second. Combining several GDDR3 chips on a graphics card would enable speeds of 8.0 gigabyte per second.

McCaron forecasts that the global market for graphic memory chips would increase by 43% to $1.5 billion in 2005 break through the $2 billion in 2006, with high-performance PCs eventually becoming the bigger market for the latest chips over the consoles.

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