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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MisterAnon - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
As someone who owns both I haven't experienced any of those issues, and AMD still has features that Nvidia hasn't implemented like the ability to play games on multiple monitors with different resolutions.Everyone here knows that you're just salty that you wasted money on a Titan X (I didn't know people actually bought these terribly valued things) which is bad value even among Nvidia cards yet alone right before R9 300 is coming. Lol get over it.
chizow - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
So you can confirm for a fact AMD GPUs fixed low power state while driving multiple monitors? Which driver? This was still broken as of the Dec. WHQL. And Nvidia can't play games on multiple monitors with diff resolutions? What kind of nonsense is this? Windowed mode right? I run multiple instances and multiple games on diff monitors no problem at all. Just more rubbish from usual AMD idiots.And yes, it sounds like you're salty because you can't afford better, don't worry, one day you might get there!
Alexvrb - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Sounds to me like he was talking about playing one game across multiple monitors of differing resolution. Wait, uh oh, someone said something that wasn't positive about your precious! WHOOSH! Off to set these villains right!chizow - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Whoosh, AMD fanboys wrong, as usual.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJC8uRqoGRU
Crunchy005 - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
"I administrate a multi-million dollar data center that disagrees with you."I wonder how much money they might save by looking at something other than Nvidia. I'm sure he doesn't look at price/performance at all on anything but Nvidia and blindly buys Nvidia top line regardless of price. I kind of feel sorry for that datacenter.
chizow - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
LMAO, how much money would you save by having dozens of researchers, scientists, and doctors twiddling their thumbs because the CUDA-based tools and programs they wrote don't work on the hardware you purchased?What you and other AMD fanboys don't realize when espousing the bullshit slidedeck benefits of AMD Open Junkware like OpenCL, is that people's time is money, and on a more morbid note, you can't get time back so its actually wasting what they consider valuable moments of their lives if they have downtime.
We have people competing for time on our clusters, so yeah, no need to feel sorry for us, feel sorry for the guy who gets fired for trying a science experiment hoping support arrives sometime in the next year or so without first consulting his end-users. Honestly, comments like this shows how little real world experience you have, no one is going to risk their job and livelihood on an unproven commodity, which is why AMD has such a poor showing in the professional and HPC markets.
dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
What sort of major problems have you encountered with Nvidia professional products? Hardware, driver related? My personal experience with Quadro's at least (5000, K5000) has been great running workloads in Maya and Adobe CS6/CC.testbug00 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
A "newer driver" broke some other parts of the system. Also some issues with it and forcing my laptop to shut down.Having to adjust the voltage by getting to the PCB to make the GPU stop crashing my computer is no fun.
chizow - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Huh? Sounds like more nonsense. You probably should've just put in for service or RMA.testbug00 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
On my laptop? Out of warranty? Send it to who exactly?Apart from the weird driver bug (Which I believe was statistically unlikely and is NOT the norm (Given my other experiences have all been perfectly fine, that is doubly true)) and the one time opening it up and being a general PITA, everything works.