Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked Korean chipmaker SK hynix to pull forward delivery of 12-layer HBM4 chips by half a year, according to the company's group chairman Chey Tae-won.
In a keynote speech at the SK AI Summit 2024 on Monday, Chey said he responded by deferring to CEO Kwak Noh-jung, who in turn promised to try.
The chips were originally set for delivery in the first half of 2026, but bringing the schedule forward by six months would see them released before the end of 2025. That's quite a tall order.
SK hynix's 12-layer HBM3E products were scheduled to be placed into the supply chain just this quarter – Q4 2024. Mass production of the most advanced chip to date only began in late September.
16-layer HBM3E samples are expected to be available in the first half of 2025, Kwak announced during the summit. The chips are made using Mass Reflow Molded Underfill (MR-MUF) process, a packaging technique that improves thermal management and was used on the 12-layer chips. There's more on them in our sister site, Blocks & Files.
The CEO described the 16-layer HBM3E chips as having an 18 percent improvement in learning performance and 32 percent improvement in inference performance over the 12-layer chips of the same generation.