AMD Info! HBM-equipped Radeon this quarter! Zen CPU architecture in 2016

[JEMC]

Lafiel said:

JEMC said:

Believe it or not, there are already 290X cards with 8GB of GDDR5.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sapphire-vapor-x-r9-290x-8gb,3977.html

And they don't use much more power (note that the review was comparing a reference 290X with the overclocked 8GB variant).

But what that shed tells me, however, is that AMD would be crazy to launch a top end card with less memory than a mid-range one. It makes no sense.

the vram size importance is overstated, HBM has tremendously higher bandwith than GDDR ram, meaning that lots of files that are better kept inside the GDDR ram could easily be deleted/overwritten in HBM and loaded into it when needed instead

additionally with GDDR you need bigger ram sizes to increase bandwith

Yes, but if you delete the files from the VRAM and then need them again, having to load them again from your HDD/SSD is a lot slower. That's the point of having more VRAM, right? To load as much info as possible into the GPU to avoid having to load it from the "slow" system.

 

@Mummelmann: Good choices