AMD To Launch New Desktop GPU This Quarter (Q2’15) With HBM
by Ryan Smith on May 6, 2015 2:22 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- AMD FAD 2015
Having just left the stage at AMD’s financial analyst day is CEO Dr. Lisa Su, who was on stage to present an update on AMD’s computing and graphic business. As AMD has already previously discussed their technology roadmaps over the next two years earlier in this presentation, we’ll jump right into the new material.
Not mentioned in AMD’s GPU roadmap but now being mentioned by Dr. Su is confirmation that AMD will be launching new desktop GPUs this quarter. AMD is not saying much about these new products quite yet, though based on their description it does sound like we’re looking at high-performance products (and for anyone asking, the picture of the card is a placeholder; AMD doesn’t want to show any pictures of the real product quite yet). These new products will support DirectX 12, though I will caution against confusing that with Feature Level 12_x support until we know more.
Meanwhile the big news here is that these forthcoming GPUs will be the first AMD GPUs to support High Bandwidth Memory. AMD’s GPU roadmap coyly labels this as a 2016 technology, but in fact it is coming to GPUs in 2015. The advantage of going with HBM at this time is that it will allow AMD to greatly increase their memory bandwidth capabilities while bringing down power consumption. Coupled with the fact that any new GPU from AMD should also include AMD’s latest color compression technology, and the implication is that the effective increase in memory bandwidth should be quite large. For AMD, they see this as being one of the keys of delivering better 4K performance along with better VR performance.
In the process AMD has also confirmed that these HBM-equipped GPUs will allow them to experiment with new form factors. By placing the memory on the same package as the GPU, AMD will be able to save space and produce smaller cards, which will allow them to produce designs other than the traditional large 10”+ cards that are typical of high-end video cards. AMD competitor NVIDIA has been working on HBM as well and has already shown off a test vehicle for one such card design, so we have reason to expect that AMD will be capable of something similar.
With apologies to AMD: NVIDIA’s Pascal Test Vehicle, An Example Of A Smaller, Non-Traditional Video Card Design
Finally, while talking about HBM on GPUs, AMD is also strongly hinting that they intend to bring HBM to other products as well. Given their product portfolio, we consider this to be a pretty transparent hint that the company wants to build HBM-equipped APUs. AMD’s APUs have traditionally struggled to reach peak performance due to their lack of memory bandwidth – 128-bit DDR3 only goes so far – so HBM would be a natural extension to APUs.
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Crunchy005 - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
Love how your comments keep pointing out how we can get so much more power with AMD than Nvidia. Man 3 way Cross-fire for the same price as one Nvidia card. Although can't you also get a lot more power from two 980s in SLI than a Titan X for the same price? Wow that is one overpriced card.chizow - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
How do those 3 cross-fire turdpiles perform with FreeSync? Oh right lol, still broken and delayed. money well spent on that TitanX. :)StevoLincolnite - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
At-least the Catalyst drivers worked when Windows Vista launched, nVidia was responsible for almost 30% of all Windows Vista's blue-screen crashes at one point.Yup, great drivers.
nVidia's drivers have been completely problematic during Windows 10's development.
AMD drivers on the other hand have never had such massive issues across it's entire market, this false fabrication of lies you tell needs to stop.
These are multi-billion dollar companies, if they make the wrong move (As all companies do!) then they should be ridiculed for it, nVidia's past driver mistakes makes AMD's look gold plated by comparison.
chizow - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
Given Nvidia had a similar stranglehold on the market so this is really no surprise they had more issues with Vista.And Nvidia's drivers have been problematic during win10 development? More nonsense, they were first to have WDDM 2.0 drivers for Win10 preview and DX12 drivers, so clearly they are the leading platform for Win10.
But I guess the most damning evidence is AMD's own driver release Omega that details 400 bug fixes, some of which are pretty egregious (grey/blackscreen). I guess on one hand its great that AMD actually fixed all these bugs, but it also makes you wonder, what took them so long on some of these? And more importantly, it shows AMD users like you are either full of it when they claim they don't experience driver problems, or you're too embarassed to acknowledge them or file bug reports when they happen as if that will hurt AMD's brand and image more than buggy drivers to begin with!
http://techreport.com/review/27481/catalyst-omega-...
betam4x - Thursday, May 14, 2015 - link
Not an AMD fanboy (My favorite card is my Maxwell based 750 ti), but you are trolling. I have a radeon 6970 in my gaming machine. My friends all have geforce gtx 760s and 960s. They always have issues with the games we play (GTA V, counterstrike global offensive, etc, mainly alt tabbing, random crashing, etc. especially when streaming). I've never had any issues at all with my 6970. The drivers are rock solid stable.WaltC - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Anyone who ran out and jumped on a Titan X will have ample time to reflect on the virtues of patience...;)chizow - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Nah the time to reflect is from all the hopefuls waiting months, to MAYBE attain that level of performance at a lower price point. Life is too short, if the performance is there and you have the coin, why not?But I know, AMD fans have the virtue of patience...waiting for that performance, waiting for those driver fixes, wait...how many more months til we maybe see an updated AMD part again? I will be sure to reflect how long I was able to enjoy Titan X (almost 2 months already wow!)
01189998819991197253 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
@chizowLife is too short, yet you waste hours making dozens of posts here. It's a safe assumption that your time isn't very valuable.
chizow - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
My time is valuable, but when you are efficient there's plenty of time during the work day to pass the time. :)Chaitanya - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I hope the AMD Rx-300 family of GPUs is energy efficient like the much older Radeon 7xxx series of GPUs.