Nvidia says Volta's stacked DRAM will increase memory capacity

SAN JOSE: CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has said that Volta's stacked memory will bring memory capacity improvements along with the publicised bandwidth improvements.

Yesterday Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed at the firm's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) that its Volta GPU architecture will bring stacked DRAM onto the same silicon substrate as the GPU. Now Sumit Gupta, GM of Nvidia's Tesla GPU Accelerated business unit said Volta's stacked DRAM will deliver both bandwidth and memory capacity benefits.

Huang's keynote only touched on the improvements in memory bandwidth between the GPU and onboard memory, claiming that Volta will hit 1TB/s between the GPU and stacked DRAM. Now Gupta, who manages the firm's GPGPU operations, said that stacking DRAM will also mitigate the GDDR5 memory capacity constrants that forced the firm to put between 6GB and 8GB of memory on its Tesla K series cards.

Gupta said, "Stacking memory gives more capacity than you can imagine right now," adding that Nvidia's move to stack memory now "shifts the limit to what memory manufacturers can produce at a good yield".

He also said that stacking memory isn't merely about performance but rather memory bandwidth per Watt, an area where Volta's memory placement could see significant improvements over external memory.

Gupta wouldn't provide any further details about Volta but clarified that when Huang mentioned DDR memory in his keynote, it was a generalisation rather than discarding the use of GDDR memory. He said it is unlikely that the firm will move down to using standard DDR memory due to its lower bandwidth compared to GDDR modules. µ