Micron has announced it's launching its next-gen GDDR7 memory in 1H 2024, ready for a new wave of graphics cards... but who will be first? AMD's new Radeon or NVIDIA's new GeForce GPU inside of your next-gen Gaming PC?

The new Micron GDDR7 memory will be made on the 1ß process node, acting as a faster, more efficient VRAM that replaces GDDR6 and GDDR6X. Right now, AMD only uses GDDR6 on its Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards, with the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX featuring 24GB of GDDR6 memory at 20Gbps. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 has 24GB of faster GDDR6X memory at 22Gbps.

• Read more: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 Release Date
• Read more: NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 arrive in 2025

AMD could equip its new Radeon RX 7000 series refresh GPUs or next-gen Radeon RX 8000 series GPUs to feature Micron's next-gen GDDR7 memory. We should see memory bandwidth skyrocket, fueling next-gen games at 4K and beyond... where memory bandwidth really matters. Especially inside a next-gen Ready to Ship Gaming PC.

GDDR7 memory has up to 36Gbps of bandwidth at its disposal, which is an incredible leap up from the max of 20Gbps with GDDR6. This means lower-end graphics cards with GDDR7 in the future will have much faster VRAM, and should better drive high-res gaming of the future. Mid-range cards could have the same bandwidth as the flagship RTX 4090 and its 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth, with a mid-range card of the future featuring 846GB/sec up to 1.15TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

• GDDR7 @ 36Gbps on 128-bit memory bus: 576GB/sec
• GDDR7 @ 36Gbps on 192-bit memory bus: 846GB/sec
• GDDR7 @ 36Gbps on 256-bit memory bus: 1152GB/sec
• GDDR7 @ 36Gbps on 320-bit memory bus: 1440GB/sec
• GDDR7 @ 36Gbps on 384-bit memory bus: 1728GB/sec

This is compared to the flagship AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards:

• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: 24GB GDDR6 @ 20Gbps on 384-bit memory bus: 960GB/sec
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090: 24GB GDDR6X @ 22Gbps on 384-bit memory bus: 1008GB/sec

Micron explains: "In graphics, industry analysts continue to expect graphics’ TAM compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to outpace the broader market, supported by applications across client and data center. We expect customer inventories to normalize in calendar Q3. We plan to introduce our next-generation G7 product on our industry-leading 1ß node in the first half of calendar year 2024".

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