Samsung Ships Industry-First Commercial HBM4 With Ultimate Performance for AI Computing

Samsung Electronics, a global leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass production of its industry-leading HBM4 and has shipped commercial products to customers. This achievement marks a first in the industry, securing an early leadership position in the HBM4 market.

Samsung Electronics HBM4, is a sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory solution for AI and HPC applications.

By proactively leveraging its most advanced 6th-generation 10 nanometer (nm)-class DRAM process (1c), the company achieved stable yields and industry-leading performance from the outset of mass production — all accomplished seamlessly and without any additional redesigns.

“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,” said Sang Joon Hwang, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Development at Samsung Electronics. “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 HBM4 delivers a consistent processing speed of 11.7 gigabits-per-second (Gbps), exceeding the industry standard of 8Gbps by approximately 46% and setting a new benchmark for HBM4 performance. This represents a 1.22x increase over the maximum pin speed of 9.6Gbps of its predecessor, HBM3E. HBM4’s performance can be further enhanced up to 13Gbps, as well, effectively mitigating data bottlenecks that intensify as AI models continue to scale up.

Also, total memory bandwidth per single stack is increased by 2.7x compared to HBM3E, to a maximum of 3.3 terabytes-per-second (TB/s).

Through 12-layer stacking technology, Samsung offers HBM4 in capacities ranging from 24 gigabytes (GB) to 36GB. The company will also keep its capacity options aligned with future customer timelines by utilizing 16-layer stacking, which will expand offerings to up to 48GB.

In order to address power consumption and thermal challenges driven by the doubling of data I/Os from 1,024 to 2,048 pins, Samsung has integrated advanced low-power design solutions into the core die. HBM4 also achieves a 40% improvement in power efficiency by leveraging low-voltage through silicon via (TSV) technology and power distribution network (PDN) optimization, while enhancing thermal resistance by 10% and heat dissipation by 30%, compared to HBM3E.

By bringing outstanding performance, energy efficiency and high reliability to tomorrow’s datacenter environments, Samsung’s HBM4 enables customers to achieve maximized GPU throughput and effectively manage their total cost of ownership (TCO).