The day before, the South Korean company SK hynix announced in an official press release that it had begun mass production of HBM3E memory with 12-layer stacks with a capacity of 36 GB. This is not only the most modern memory of this type, but also the most capacious one currently produced. SK hynix customers will receive this memory by the end of this year.
Image Source: SK Hynix
It’s not hard to guess that Nvidia will be among these customers, as SK hynix remains the GPU and compute accelerator developer’s main supplier of HBM across generations. Until now, as noted in a press release from the South Korean company, the maximum capacity of 24 GB was provided by the 8-layer HBM3E stack. The company managed to make the DRAM chips that form the stack 40% thinner, which ultimately allowed the stack capacity to increase by 50% compared to the 8-layer version. SK hynix began shipping HBM3E 8-layer stacks in March of this year, so it has achieved this progress in just six months.
Since 2013, SK hynix has been supplying a full range of HBM family chips. The information transfer speed in the 12-layer HBM3E stack reaches 9.6 Gbit/s. Increasing the number of layers in a stack while reducing the thickness of each layer is combined with an improvement in thermal conductivity properties by 10% compared to the previous generation of memory. In morning trading in Seoul, SK hynix shares rose 8.3% after announcing the start of production of the latest HBM memory family. In total, since the beginning of the year, the company’s shares have strengthened in price by more than 25%. Such dynamics were also facilitated by a favorable revenue forecast for the current quarter from competing memory manufacturer Micron Technology.