Introduction
On May 15, we sat in on a conference call with AMD to learn all about High Bandwidth Memory. If you haven't heard about HBM and our flurry of news posts on the exciting new memory for GPUs, this article will provide you with everything you need to know. HBM is an important step for AMD, as it is powering its upcoming Radeon R9 390X, with its new Fiji architecture.
AMD has spent the last seven years on the development of HBM, with the motivation behind it being that they wanted to solve one of the bigger problems of the future at the time - bandwidth - which was something that had to be solved, period. Performance-per-watt is very important to both AMD and NVIDIA, and the use of HBM is one of the key ways of getting there.
The development of HBM has taken close to a decade, and has its own unique challenges thanks to it being a very high density interconnect. But, the payoff would allow AMD to build many devices, from smaller APUs to the big bad flagship GPUs that we should expect with the upcoming Radeon R9 390X.
With GDDR5 'entering the inefficient region of the power/performance curve' as you can see in the above shot from AMD's slide, HBM is needed now, more than ever.
