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Samsung First to Mass Produce Faster Graphics Chip

Posted on: Tuesday, 21 June 2005, 06:15 CDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world's top maker of memory chips, on Monday said it is the first supplier to mass produce graphic chips for the next generation of video games.

Mueez Deen, director of graphics for the U.S. semiconductor unit of Samsung, said it has begun high-volume manufacturing of a 512-megabit graphics DDR3 memory chip for use in gaming consoles and personal computers.

Samsung, which is based in Seoul, South Korea, has jumped ahead of rivals in the graphics memory chip market such as Hynix Semiconductor Inc., also of South Korea, and Infineon Technologies AG of Germany, he said.

Samsung's move to mass produce the chips comes several months ahead of the arrival of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, the first major device that will depend on the DDR3 powered chip.

By being first into mass production, Samsung stands to win a big chunk of the early market for these chips. But with the introduction of Microsoft's console still months away, Samsung rivals have time to reach volume production as well, analyst Dean McCaron of market forecaster Mercury Research said.

The chips run at top speeds of 1.6 gigabits. When several of the chips are arrayed together in a graphics card to run inside gaming devices, they can achieve data transfer speeds of 6.4 gigabytes, or billions of bytes, per second.

In addition, Samsung said it is starting to develop a 2.0 gigabit per second GDDR3 (graphics double data rate 3) chip that can process graphics 50 percent faster than the 512 megabit chip now in mass production. When 2.0-gigabit chips are mounted together on a graphics card they can achieve 8.0 gigabyte-per-second speeds.

"This is the fastest (graphics memory) product on the planet," Deen said.

Samsung introduced its first generation of 128-megabit graphics double-data-rate (DDR) chips in 2002. The fastest graphics chip Samsung had produced until now was a 1.4 gigabit-per-second 256-megabit chip.

Most mainstream video game systems still rely on 128-megabit graphics memory. Deen said that 512-megabit chips will slowly overtake slower chips as the next generation of high-performance gaming systems are sold in large numbers. Samsung said it plans to introduce a 1-gigabit version in a year or two.

GDDR3 chips help enable ever faster processing speeds needed to render the increasingly realistic images and graphics in upcoming computer consoles such as the Microsoft Xbox 360 that is slated to be available in the second half of the year and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 due next spring.

While the graphics chips will at first be mostly used in high-performance video game consoles, the chips will also begin to power PC video games, including those based on Nvidia's graphics processing chip due out this week, Said Mercury Research's McCaron.

In the long run, high-performance PC game systems could represent a bigger market for Samsung's latest graphics chips, but the video console market will represent the biggest market initially, McCaron predicted.

Mercury Research predicts that the global graphics memory chip market will increase 43 percent to $1.5 billion in 2005 and exceed $2 billion in 2006.

"We work with every major PC maker and game console maker," Deen said, but he declined to name specific customers of the DDR3.

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