Micron Technology posted an early report on its production of GDDR5X chips today, and the results sound good. The company says it's gotten working silicon back from its fabs earlier than expected, and those parts are already hitting 13Gb/s speeds. That's already toward the top end of the expected speeds for GDDR5X, whose specified transfer rates range from 10 to 14 Gb/s. Micron says those results are "incredibly promising."
The first Micron GDDR5X chips are being produced on the company's 20-nm process, and they'll be 8Gb (1GB) dies. The company expects mass production of these parts to begin in the summer of this year, and it'll announce sampling dates for the chips later this spring. Tantalizingly, Micron says that going off its early performance results, we could see GDDR5X chips exceed the 14 Gb/s speed range as time goes on. JEDEC standardized GDDR5X graphics memory just a couple weeks ago, so it's heartening to see production of this improved graphics RAM move so fast.