Qimonda announced today that it has begun sampling its new GDDR5 graphics RAM to customers. The GDDR5 RAM is available in 512MB capacities and will see duty in graphics cards hopefully in the near future.

Currently the vast majority of video cards on the market from ATI and NVIDIA are still running GDDR3 RAM. ATI uses GDDR4 in two of its video cards. I have to wonder with the big video card makers not jumping on GDDR4 if the adoption of GDDR5 memory will happen very quickly.

Qimonda says that the GDDR5 standard is nearing finalization in JDEC. The RAM will be available with data rates up to 20Gytes/s per component. That speed is more than double the bandwidth of the fastest GDDR3 modules commonly used today. The first GDDR5 using products are expected in 2008.

Via Qimonda