Just weeks away from the rumored public debut of AMD's new ATI Radeon 4000-series GPUs, AMD clues us in on a tantalizing tidbit about a key technology found in its next generation graphics cards. AMD's new lineup of graphics cards will not only use Graphics Double Data Rate 5 (GDDR5) memory, but AMD also claims that this will actually be "the first commercial implementation" of the technology.

"Today's GPU performance is limited by the rate at which data can be moved on and off the graphics chip, which in turn is limited by the memory interface width and die size. The higher data rates supported by GDDR5 – up to 5x that of GDDR3 and 4x that of GDDR4 – enable more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface, which can translate into superior performance delivered from smaller, more cost-effective chips. AMD's senior engineers worked closely with industry standards body JEDEC in developing the new memory technology and defining the GDDR5 spec."

AMD worked with Samsung, Hynix, and Qimonda to develop its implementation of GDDR5. It is the German-based Qimonda, however, who will be supplying the GDDR5 to AMD for the launch of the new Radeon graphics cards. Qimonda claims to have "already started mass production and the volume shipping of GDDR5 512Mbit components with a speed of 4.0Gbps to AMD", despite having produced the first product samples only six months ago.

You can read the entire article at HotHardware.