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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chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
It will certainly be interesting to see how much total board power AMD will save by going to HBM. They quote ~50% less power from GDDR5, so if we say a typical 250W Hawaii based part and maybe 50W of that is just RAM, 50% reduction going to HBM might be 225W instead of 250W, or roughly 10% decrease just from RAM, wouldn't be bad at all. Maybe another 10-15% drop from refining existing ASICs and you are looking at a 200W part instead of a 250W part. With some perf bumps from arch changes and clock bumps you might be getting close to Maxwell-level efficiency levels, but I wouldn't expect too much from this 2015 gen, the big 2x efficiency bump wasn't on the slide until 2016.The one area they will definitely benefit from HBM is with a dual-GPU design, where VRAM takes up massive amounts of board space, especially on an X2 part. They will be able to fit 2xGPUs on there np, but that probably won't necessarily mean a smaller cooler or board size, unless they slap two AIO water blocks on there.
testbug00 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I think that AMD is going to probably push for higher clocks on current HBM cards. Unless they somehow manage to get Fiji into a notebook! A 400W+ notebook XDFully agree with HBM dual GPU designs. ^__^
testbug00 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
A suggestion for the site for things such as this, perhaps do a liveblog for these kinds of events and after that's done separate it into several stories? You have 7 pipeline stories where you probably only need 3-4.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
This one is intentional. We wanted to break up each of these items individually.Creig - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Any chance for a "vote up/down" button for comments? And negative comments that fall below a certain threshold get automatically hidden? There are certain posters in these comments sections who constantly rant/rave/insult and generally annoy the rest of the people who are trying to hold meaningful discussions. That way, the readers have control and can self-moderate these dialogues.Just a suggestion.
testbug00 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Just having a better threading system would be nice. It gets hard to see who is replying to who once you get past the first 3-4 replies (where they all become the same indent, without a "in response to X post" or something like that.chizow - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Yeah its annoying when people who don't even buy or use these products give bad advice over and over again. C'mon Creig, put your big boy pants on, stop crying, and join the conversation!Creig - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
What's the matter, chizow? Afraid that you fall into the "rant/rave/insult" category? If the people who read these comments find your posts to be helpful and insightful then you won't have anything to worry about. If they find your comments to be annoying and immature, then you likely have bigger problems than being voted down and may want to engage in some serious self-reflection about your attitude.chizow - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
I'm not worried about anything Creig lol, have you ever considered the only reason you find my posts annoying and immature is because I call you and like-minded fanboys out for all the stupid things you've said over and over throughout the years?Looks like its working, you've been MUCH more responsible in your posting tendencies and recommendations lately.
Indeed, I haven't seen you misinforming the community lately on why FreeSync is better than G-Sync because some dishonest guy at AMD put 9-240Hz supported on a whitepaper 10 months before AMD even had a viable VRR solution! Mission Accomplished!
I don't expect you to reply to this either, but I am sure if there was a downvote button, you and all your AMD fanboy buddies would be mad-clicking it!
Crunchy005 - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
Up/Down vote might give him a visual on how his posts are not wanted...Might knock some sense into him.