AMD hopes its graphics card products will have an extra edge over Nvidia equivalents through the addition of high bandwidth memory (HBM), a potentially superior replacement to conventional GDDR5 memory.
According to the company, GDDR5 RAM is not becoming any smaller-- on the contrary, it requires "significant board real estate," as well as greater amounts of power in order to meet the demands of increasingly faster GPUs. Enter HBM, a means to stack memory cells vertically instead of next to each other.
As AMD puts it, the memory stacks communicate with each other and the core GPU using "silicon vias" interconnects, essentially tiny holes drilled through the physical cells buffered by "microbumps." An "interposer" interconnect links all components together. The result? More dense memory providing superior performance at lower bandwidth per watt costs.
Continue reading...