Leaked benchmarks for AMD Radeon RX 480 hits minimum VR spec for $199

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Alby_da_Wolf said:

About quad- and octo-channel DDR4, quad should become mid-upper mainstream quite soon, while octo will be high-end PC, server and workstation tech for a while, but I would still consider it, AMD is planning also new high-end APUs, that it will sell both as plain PC APUs and as Opteron ones, quite likely ASUS and many others will make not only expensive high-end and high overclock-ready mobos, but also well equipped mid/high-end ones at a reasonable overprice compared to average ones, in 2000 and 2004 for example ASUS was still a lot more expensive than average competitors, too much for cheap PCs, but already in 2009 I was able to choose it for very few tens euros overprice compared to others.

We will still sit with Dual-Channel for the immediate future.

The bulk of Motherboards need to hit various price-points, which is a couple hundred brucks and under...
Tri/Quad Channel memory configurations are usually reserved for high-end motherboards in the Socket 2011 form factor on the Intel Side, which means you need to pair it up with an expensive CPU.

For cheaper boards, every dollar counts, you need to minimize PCB traces and thus layers to hit those points... And AMD usually likes to be very price competitive, having less memory channels is one way to do that.

Zen is also not going to be an ultra high-end processor competing with Socket 2011 chips.
It will be price/performance competitive with Intel's mainstream lineup though and likely selling us more CPU cores while they are at it, so it goes without saying that Dual-Channel is what will happen in AMD's lineup, even for APU's. Possibly augmented with a Side-Port like tech with HBM or GDDR5/GDDR5X.

Alby_da_Wolf said:

About drivers, I hope the resistance of half a billion users to Win 10, plus the growth of a huge Windows-free market outside of PCs wil push game devs to support again more OpenGL, and obviously Vulkan is welcome too.

Agreed.

With that said... Vulkan is OpenGL's successor... Vulkan is what Direct X 12 is to Direct X 11.

Vulkan is also built on AMD's Mantle technology... AMD realised fairly quickly that it's a long and expensive process building an API that has a wide Software and Hardware ecosystem... So they donated Mantle to the Khronos group where it became Vulkan... Now nVidia and Intel have no choice but to support it. :P