Qimonda's 128MB chip brings forth 2GB and 4GB cards

THE COMPANY FORMERLY KNOWN AS the memory division of Siemens, later spun off as Infineon and now spun-off again as Qimonda announced its plans for GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory chips.

The company added GDDR-3 memory chip with one Gigabit capacity (128MB), clearly for the Xbox 360 console. Only four chips are now needed for 512MB of GDDR3 memory inside the box), notebooks and discrete graphics vendors.

The clock speed upgrades were also introduced across the board, with clocks ranging from 1 to 1.2 GHz. We wonder will Microsoft upgrade the clock speed of the memory inside the Xbox or not - but it is clearly that there is potential to do so.

At press time, it was unclear whether Qimonda was being used as the manufacturer of memory chips for Wii and PS3.

With this chip, graphic card manufacturers can now consider creating products with 1GB for mainstream, and target 2GB frame buffer with high-end products. More importantly, next-gen mainstream graphics cards could be more simplified due to number of chips. Eight, and not sixteen chips are now needed for 1GB frame-buffer, so in case of quite a lot of cards on the market, you could put 1GB frame-buffer memory on the card and print only one side of the PCB.

Also, Qimonda wants these modules to be used inside as many notebooks as possible, citing ideal thermal and density characteristics. Obviously the company wants those lucrative deals for Nvidia Hybrid-SLI and AMD's hybrid-Crossfire projects.

The firm also outlined its plans for GDDR5 memory, since they decided to can GDDR4 all together. You can expect the first working chips by years end, and at the end of 2008, market should feature at least seven per cent of GDDR5 chips. By the end of 2009, Qimonda is hoping for a 44 per cent market share. µ