With Nvidia's 10 series graphics cards set to be commercially available in the not-too-distant future, that means that we're going to need a lot of the new memory standard Micron is pushing as a stop-gap between now and mass-produced HBM: GDDR5X. Offering greater performance than GDDR5, it's set to give this next-generation of graphics cards more bandwidth than ever at a more affordable price point, so where is it?
Heading out of the factory right now. In-fact Micron has begun mass-production of the new memory chips faster than expected. Initially we heard that GDDR5X would begin mass production in the summer of this year, but Micron has managed to get everything it needs up and running more than a month sooner.
That might mean that stock of Nvidia's first 10 series cards, the 1070 and 1080 cards is greater than initially expected, hopefully helping keep the price down to prevent scalpers from jumping on the new hardware.
The GTX 1080 will come equipped with 8GB of the new memory and when combined with its 256bit bus, should deliver 320GBps of bandwidth, quite a jump from the previous generation.
Although this isn't quite what can be achieved with High Bandwidth Memory, while stock on that standard remains thin, GDDR5X will likely act as the go-between technology for this generation.