HBM 3D Stacked Memory is up to 9X Faster Than GDDR5 – Coming With AMD R9 390X and R9 380X 20nm Pirate Islands

[JEMC]

Kynes said:

JEMC said:
The new memory is cool and with AMD having access to it a year ahead of Nvidia could prove to be very good asset on its favor (and I say could because the 970/980 is faster than the previous cards while having a lower bandwidth than them).

But to me the interesting (and hard to believe) part is where they say that the 380X will be Nvidia's 970/980 competitor and 20nm like the 390X. Don't get wrong, I'd love if this is true, but then why did AMD looked for a liquid cooling solution for them?

Afaik now we have the memory power budget added to the graphics chip power budget on the same place. You can use less total power and have more power per square centimeter, so you need to extract that energy faster.

Ok, after reading it a couple of times (or more) I've realized that you were tyalking about why going with a watercooled solution for the 20nm cards. Talking about memory power and GPU power has confused me a little. It's a slow morning.

I agree that the smaller a chip is, the hotter it will get even if it uses a few less W, but is it really necessary to use WC? Sure, Intel had problems when moving past 20nm with its CPUs, but that was in part because they decided to use TIM between the chip and the heatspreader instead of welding it like they did until then. If AMD and Nvidia don't make this mistake, a good air cooler would be enough to cope with the extra heat density as long as all heatpipes make contact with it.