From GPUs to DDR5 Modules: CES 2022 Kicks Off Innovation Awards With Honorees
With 2022's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) coming up soon, we’ll take a look at some notable technologies to be highlighted at next year's Innovation Awards.
CES is arguably the most popular and essential trade show in the consumer electronics industry. Set to take place from January 5-8 of 2022, next year’s CES will be rife with exciting tech and innovation.
One aspect of CES every year is the CES Innovation Awards, a yearly competition for “honoring outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products.” This year’s contest is full of honorees offering exciting innovations in the world of hardware.
In this article, we’ll cover a couple of the Innovation Awards 2022 honorees that may be most exciting to an EE.
AMD Radeon RX 6800M Mobile Graphics
One of the big mobile graphics announcements of the past year was AMD’s release of the AMD Radeon RX 6800M.
The AMD Radeon RX 6800M. Image used courtesy of CES
Aimed at the premium gaming laptop market, the Radeon RX 6800M includes 40 compute units, 2560 stream processors, 96 MB of Infinity Cache, and 17.2B transistors on-chip.
The GPU also introduced various new technologies, including AMD’s new RDNA 2 gaming architecture, which enables frame rates up to 1440p, and AMD Smart Access Memory and AMD SmartShift Technology, aiming to improve memory and power performance, respectively.
All things considered, the Radeon RX 6800M is said to achieve a peak half and single-precision compute performance of 23.55 TFLOP and 11.78 TFLOPs, respectively, memory bandwidth up to 384 GB/s, and 145+ watts of power.
Snapdragon X65 5G Modem RF System
Another contestant in this year’s competition is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System.
The company’s 4th generation 5G modem-to-antenna solution, the Snapdragon X65 5G, was designed to support 5G rollout in smartphones, mobile broadband, and industrial Internet of Things (IoT).
Most notably, the new RF Modem signified the world’s first 10 Gb 5G solution and the first 3GPP Release 16 modem-to-antenna solution.
The X65 5G from Qualcomm. Image used courtesy of CES
Qualcomm lauds the solution’s power efficiency, integrating a 4 nm baseband chip and introducing new technologies, including Qualcomm’s 7th-gen wideband envelope tracking, AI-enhanced signal boost, and 5G PowerSave 2.0.
Altogether, the device claims to increase design flexibility, enable faster 5G speeds, and improve capacity with the available spectrum.
Samsung 512 GB DDR5 RDIMM
The third and final honoree covered in this article is Samsung’s 512 GB DDR5 RDIMM.
Samsung’s 512 GB DDR5 RDIMM. Image used courtesy of CES
This new product from Samsung is the industry’s first 512 GB DDR5 registered dual in-line memory module (RDIMM) and was made possible through various technological advancements. These include the use of a high-dielectric constant (k) metal gate (HKMG) process technology, the introduction of novel low-voltage processes, and the use of through-silicon via (TSV) techniques.
Designed for applications such as high-performance computing, AI, and data centers, the module integrates 40 DRAM packages, each consisting of 16 Gb DDR5 dies.
Samsung claims the HKMG material offers a 13% reduction in power consumption while still offering a speed of 7200 Mbps, a 2x improvement over DDR4.
A Year of Innovation
All said and done, 2021 was undoubtedly an excellent year for advancement in the semiconductor industry.
Amongst all of the advancements, three that are up for awards at CES are AMD's Radeon RX 6800M, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X65 5G Modem, and Samsung's 512GB DDR5 RDIMM.
The winners will be announced during CES between Jan 5-8 of 2022.
We'll look forward to seeing the outcomes of these awards as well as what next year's CES will bring us.
