Hynix will soon sample what it claims is the world's first 512Mb GDDR 4 memory chip, the South Korean chip-maker said yesterday.

Hynix's part runs at 1.45GHz, the company said, and can shuffle up to 11.6GB of data every second. GDDR 4 can process almost double the data than GDDR 3 can in the same amount of time. GDDR 4 is essentially a tweak of the previous, point-to-point specification rather than a radical revision.

Samsung began sampling 256Mb, 1.25GHz GDDR 4 chips in October, with a view to sampling a 1.4GHz version by the end of 2005.

Hynix said it plans to introduce a 14.4GB version on H2 2006, around six months after the chip announced yesterday goes into mass production, in early 2006. ®