Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Begins Mass Production of World's Fastest DRAM (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Late last year marked the introduction of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM courtesy of AMD's Fury family of graphics cards, each of which sports 4GB of HBM. HBM allows these new AMD GPUs to tout an impressive 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, but it's also just the first iteration of the new memory technology. Samsung has just announced that it has begun mass production of HBM2. Samsung's 4GB HBM2 package is built on a 20 nanometer process. Each package contains four 8-gigabit core dies built on top of a buffer die. Each 4GB HMB2 package is capable of delivering 256GB/sec of bandwidth, which is twice that of first generation HBM DRAM. In the example of NVIDIA's next gen GPU technology, code named Pascal, the new GPU will utilize HBM2 for its frame buffer memory. High-end consumer-grade Pascal boards will ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory (in four, 4GB packages), offering effective memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec (256GB/sec from each HMB2 package). Samsung is also reportedly readying 8GB HBM2 memory packages this year.
The initial AMD Fury card was a bit of a disappointment, I mean it is quite fast for it's size and it's also quite fast for only 4GB memory onboard, but it didn't thrash the nvidia 980Ti it competes with, despite being a newer technology with more memory bandwidth. /precisely/ why, but it may be the AMD GPU itself is simply not powerful enough to use that bandwidth effectively or the 4GB holding it back due to texture size.
I haven't investigated (nor do I care to) as to
*THAT* being said, that's phase 1 of HBM, phase 2 is about to kick in this year for both AMD and nvidia and premium video cards will be utilising this technology in the high end for certain.
The other thing that's frequently mentioned when these are brought up is that this on chip (or is it on package?) memory is going to be utilised in some of AMD's mid tier APU chips (the CPU / GPU combined ones) which should make some onboard video surprisingly damn good in the coming future. Perhaps not dedicated GPU good but may compete well with low to mid tier dedicated GPU's now.
Also for compute functions for scientific stuff or whatever people use all that number crunching stuff with dedicated GPU's for, this will be far better. (Apparently it's similar to Intel Xeon Phi or some such? (Knights landing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I guess ultimately what has enabled this technology to exist is stacking ram (?) since they can fit 4GB of memory inside a single, very small chip.
(Here you can see the existing stuff, 1GB in a single chip, the 4 smaller chips around the GPU) https://www.google.com.au/sear... soon to be 4GB in presumably the same physical space and 8GB shortly
It looks to me like stacked ram is the future in many things (SSD capacity booming due to this)
It's all pretty exciting for the future of bandwidth, 1TB/s is pretty nice and I imagine it'll only go up from there.
(I read some theories recently about 'stacking' CPU's too, although the heat may become an issue? but if they can lay out 48 layers of memory inside a chunk of silicon, why not lay out multiple processors) however that's for the smart people to figure out.
Please read the replies to this post as I don't follow as closely as I used to and several pieces of information here might be slightly off.
The HBM2 memory is manufactured by Samsung and likely to be used in both GPU boards. Even the summary states "In the example of NVIDIA's next gen GPU technology, code named Pascal, the new GPU will utilize HBM2 for its frame buffer memory. High-end consumer-grade Pascal boards will ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory (in four, 4GB packages), offering effective memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec (256GB/sec from each HMB2 package).".
As far as AMD vs. NVIDIA... competition breeds innovation, I'm happy they complete and make better packages to fight for the GPU crown.