By Dr Mike Cooke

Hynix Semiconductor announced the availability of what it claims is the world's first 512Mbit GDDR4 DRAM aimed at the graphics memory market. The fourth-generation graphics memory GDDR4 standard is designed to improve data processing speeds by close to two times than that of GDDR3. Hynix sees the product as being ideal for 64-bit computer operating systems that often need to manage vast amounts of data at once.

The new 16Mx32 512Mb GDDR4 from Hynix operates at 2.9Gbps and processes 11.6GBytes of data in 1 second. The Korean company says that it will shortly begin to sample its GDDR4 products to leading graphic chipset suppliers and plans to start mass production in early 2006. Hynix plans to introduce an even faster GDDR4 DRAM operating at 14.4GB/s by second half of 2006.