Samsung Electronics announced today that its GDDR4 (Graphics Double Data Rate, version 4) high-speed graphics memory chip is being used in both the 1GB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and the 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics processing cards. The 1GB card has the widest bus in the industry designed for full-performance, high dynamic range (HDR) rendering in PCs.

“We chose Samsung’s GDDR4 memory for our 1GB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards because its design complements our strategy in offering leading-edge technology to a broader enthusiast gaming market,” said Vijay Sharma, Director, Product Marketing, AMD Graphics Products Group. “We’re committed to working with key players in the industry like Samsung to develop advancements that work to continuously improve past solutions.”

Built with 80nm process technology, the 512Mb GDDR4-based graphics cards provides 140.8GB/s performance – 25% faster than 700MHz GDDR3 graphics memory, the most common graphics device in use today.

GDDR4 processes video images in desktop PCs, notebooks and workstations at extremely high speeds in simultaneously moving large volumes of high-definition or other high-resolution video, such as next generation Blue Ray and full HD level video images.

Samsung’s GDDR4 memory devices are now in mass production at the 512Mb density level. Samsung developed the world first GDDR4 device last year and submitted a paper on a 4Gbps GDDR4 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) earlier this year.