Samsung expects high demand for memory chips this year and next, reveals new designs | Infinium-tech
Samsung expects demand for its memory chips to remain high not only this year, but also in 2027. Song Jae-hyuk, CTO of Samsung’s Device Solutions (which makes the chips), spoke at Semicon Korea and revealed some interesting details.
So-called AI hyperscalers – companies building cloud infrastructure at scale precisely to meet AI’s ever-expanding computing needs – are ordering memory at unprecedented levels, causing prices to skyrocket.
Samsung’s focus is on mass production hbm4 (“High Bandwidth Memory”). Samsung reported strong sales in the third quarter last year due to strong demand for the previous HBM3E format, and this continued in the fourth quarter.
Sales of new HBM4 memory are planned for the first quarter of this year. Feedback from corporate customers, who have already received some HBM4 shipments, has called the chip’s performance “very satisfactory,” the CTO said.
Looking to the future, Samsung has developed a hybrid bonding technology for HBM. This reduces the thermal resistance of 12H and 16H stacks by 20%. In tests, Samsung saw 11% lower temperatures on the base die. It is unclear when hybrid-bonded dies will be available to consumers.
Another related technique is called zHBM, which stacks in the Z-axis. This approach will increase memory bandwidth by 4 times while reducing power consumption by 25%.
Samsung HBM-PIM memory tested in a custom AMD Instinct MI100
Samsung is also working on a custom HBM design that has some computation capabilities built directly into memory (it’s called HBM). processing-in-memory or PIM). According to the CTO, the custom HBM design can increase performance by 2.8 times while keeping power efficiency the same.
Leave a Reply