| Arkaign said: The rumor mills always have a field day with this kind of clickbait ahead of major GPU releases. I've followed this stuff since the 80s, and this list of rumors is clearly created by someone who tried hard to make it look realistic, and failed. It's like a spec-sheet for a 14nm or 16nm GPU (true full 14nm lithography, not 20nm/22nm finfet). Why? Because what we're talking about here would end up being significantly larger and hotter than GTX480 was on 40nm, along with correspondingly higher power consumption. It's not entirely unlikely that HBM might be ready in small quantities, but I also think that's more likely to hit around Q3-Q4 2015. |
I doublechecked my former infos, and the chip seems quite legit. AMD had a Tape-Out of a 500+ square millimeter chip lately, which would fit for this specs. The only thing I do not really believe are the 20nm in the OP. The HBM Chips are made in 20nm, but the graphics Chip itself probably not.
HBM is already in its second Generation (the first one was more like a test) and production has already started. Which means it is very likely there will be enough of them for a late Q1-Q2 release date if the yield rate ain't too bad.
HBM also has a much simpler memory controller. Depending on the one used in the previous Chip the TDP gain can vary from 5W up to 50W. Combined with an incremental update of the GCN Architecture it is very possible to get this Chip down to 250-300W TDP. Besides, there had been another leak with exactly the same specs exept the Chip only clocking at 800Mhz, which might indicate that AMD goes again the dual mode (quiet mode and uber mode) like they did with the 290X.
| JEMC said: As a rumor is looks good (so a beast of a GPU), but why would AMD go with 4GB of VRAM when some current games are already asking for more? |
AMD came up with new, vastly improved color and texture compression techniques, which results in less memory needs. It's the reason why AMDs Radean HD 285 only have 2GiB of RAM while the 280, which it intends to replace, had 3.
Another reason could be practical: HBM is a new, not yet fully proven technology and pretty much unknown yield rates. Had they put 8 GiB onto the Graphics Cards, they might not have enough of them at the time of the scheduled release. 4 GiB is still a good compromise, and like I said, AMDs new compression technologies should alleviate the problem quite a bit.
Besides, just like the 290X lately, I'm pretty sure there will be Versions later on with double as much RAM as the normal Version
