Samsung seems to want to get a lot of bragging rights as of lately. Yesterday they have announced to have a technology that allows stacking 12 DRAM chips. You can read it all here.

According to Samsung it’s no small feat to be able to stack 12 DRAM chips. You have to be able to interconnect 12 DRAM chips through a 3D configuration of more than 60.000 TSV holes, each with 1/20 the thickness of a human hair. It’s easy to see why it’s not easy even if you don’t fully understand the technology.

These chips have the same thickness as the older HBM2 of 8 layers so hardware designers can just use these chips instead. Moreover TSV has shorter data transmission than wire bonding, so it will be faster and consume less power.

This is all great but how does that translate to actual hardware. The answer is that a single HBM2 chip will be able to have a maximum of 24GB. A Radeon VII has 16GB by using 4 HBM2 chips but with this technology it could have a lot more, up to 96GB. This will be very useful for servers and workstations. With a less dense configurations it will be also useful for desktops and laptops. Perhaps we will see GPUs with a lot more RAM very soon. It all depends on price and availability.

This is what Hong Joo Baek, the executive vice president of TSP (Test & System Package), had to say:

Packaging technology that secures all of the intricacies of ultra-performance memory is becoming tremendously important, with the wide variety of new-age applications, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and High Power Computing (HPC).

As Moore’s law scaling reaches its limit, the role of 3D-TSV technology is expected to become even more critical. We want to be at the forefront of this state-of-the-art chip packaging technology.

He’s absolutely right and we welcome these advancements in memory technology.