Samsung officially ships HBM4 ready for NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI chips

Samsung has been fighting hard on its semiconductor and HBM memory business over the last few years, but now it has officially started commercially deploying its next-gen HBM4 memory, ready for NVIDIA's new Rubin AI chips.

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The company explained in a press release that its new HBM4 memory has transfer speeds of 11.7Gbps, but when overclocked like NVIDIA needs it, Samsung's new HBM4 is capable of 13Gbps. Its new leading-edge DRAM is based on a 4nm logic die for maximum performance, fabbed in-house at Samsung Foundry, with its 1c DRAM also in play.

Sang Joon Hwang, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Development at Samsung Electronics, said: "Instead of taking the conventional path of utilizing existing proven designs, Samsung took the leap and adopted the most advanced nodes like the 1c DRAM and 4nm logic process for HBM4. By leveraging our process competitiveness and design optimization, we are able to secure substantial performance headroom, enabling us to satisfy our customers' escalating demands for higher performance, when they need them".

Samsung's new HBM4 with its 11.7Gbps stock speeds exceeds the industry standard of 8Gbps by around 46% and sets a new benchmark for HBM4 performance. This is a 1.22x increase over the 9.6Gbps maximum pin speed of HBM3E, with total memory bandwidth per single stack of HBM4 being 2.7x higher than HBM3E for a total of 3.3TB/sec memory bandwidth.

Samsung and NVIDIA are working together on HBM4, with Samsung explaining in its press release that with incredibly high bandwidth and energy efficiency, Samsung's advanced HBM solutions are expected to help accelerate the development of future AI applications, and form a critical foundation for manufacturing infrastructure driven by these technologies.