AMD shows us what seven years of development can create

While most other aspects of video cards have changed and improved over the last decade, video card memory has more or less remained the same. AMD thinks its about time that changed, and with seven years of development behind this new technology, the company has proudly revealed the details behind the High Bandwidth Memory that we’ve been drooling over since rumors of the new technology started popping up. 

During its analyst day two weeks ago, AMD confirmed that its next iteration of high-end Radeon cards would adopt High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM. We’ve previously covered HBM’s technical implementation in some depth, but we haven’t had formal acknowledgment from AMD that it would release the technology, or official data on how it compared to GDDR5. Now, we do. and the final figures point to potent performance for the upcoming Radeon. AMD decided to invest in HBM research seven years ago, when it became apparent that a new memory standard would be needed to replace GDDR5. Conventional GDDR designs have scaled extremely well over the past decade, but as the slide below shows, conventional DRAM scaling and the difficulty of routing so many traces around the GPU itself had become a significant problem.