GTX 1080 unveiled; 9 teraflops

[JEMC]

torok said:

JEMC said:

I don't know how could AMD keep Fury as their high-end cards with only 4GB. That's why I think (or hope) that the 490X will be faster than Fury and around GTX 1070 levels of performance.

Also, I think that AMD has Vega up and running, but they are waiting on HBM2 prices to fall down to launch it. They expect it will happen early next year, but if it happens before, they could release Vega late this year.

The decision to go with only 4GB was made to allow the use of HBM. AMD got exclusive access to HBM and a high share of the initial production of the HBM2 modules. They kind of screwed the Fury X, but managed to get a huge share of HBM2. Nvidia isn't using it on Pascal probably because the amount of modules they would be capable to secure was too low so they went with GDDR5X. It was a strategic sacrifice to "screw" Pascal. Let's see if it pays off.

They got the rights to use HBM becuase they co-developed it with Hynix, and used it on Fury to both show off what they had done and because HBM uses less power than GDDR5, and they needed that margin with athe beast that is Fury.

The thing with HBM2 is that Samsung also makes the modules and Nvidia has access to it. But it's too expensive to use it for now, which is why neither AMD nor Nvidia are using it.