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Forums - Gaming - Nintendo NX to use GDDR5X?

JEMC on 28 October 2015
Bofferbrauer said:
JEMC said:
Unless Nintendo plans to go with a Fiji chip or one or the top of the line chips of the next Artic Islands, I doubt they'll use HBM.

DDR3 is EoL, and why Nintendo could use it, its price will only go up and its availability down. GDDR5 or DDR4 are more likely and of those, DDR4 probably is probably their best bet: it's fast, uses less power than DDR3 (and a lot less than GDDR5), it's available in large quantities and as it gets more common in the PC space (the latest Intel chips are already DDR4 and the next AMD chips will also bet on DDR4) its price will also go down.

DDR4-3200 (the fastest variant currently specified by the JEDEC) is only about 50% faster than DDR3-2133 (again, the fastest variant specified by JEDEC), which would barely be enough for the Xbox ONE. So unless it's used in conjunction with some eDRAM (expensive), DDR4 would not be enough.

HBM2 is good on paper, but too new and thus very expensive, and it's necessary interposer keeps it at a pretty high price, too

GDDR5 is probably the cheapest, but also the most energy consuming one of the bunch

GDDR5X is useless unless the GPU part would reach High-end levels. Since those cards alone consume more enrgy than a whole console, it's sole advantage over GDDR5 would be wasted

There is a 5th solution though: HMC, Hybrid Memory Cube. It's Bandwith is on par with GDDR5(X) but somewhat lower than HBM (160GB/s to 320GB/s depending on the number of Lanes). Since the huge amount of Bandwith provided by HBM is not needed however, HMC would largely suffice. Like HBM, it's comprised of stacked RAM, but more simple setup and thus cheaper to produce. Also unlike HBM or GDDR, it allows simultanous access to and from the RAM (meaning writing and reading data at the same time). It's main drawback is that the technolgy has yet to be implemented into a consumer device. Still, if it where up to me, that's the one which I would probably choose

Isn't HMC the tech that Nvidia choose instead of HBM? And that drawback that you mention is quite big, to be honest, and given that we're talking about Nintendo, definitive.

I know DDR4 doesn't have the bandwidth of GRRD5 or HBM, but Wii U with its DDR3-1600 modules only achieves 12.8 GB/s and the measly 32 MB of eDRAM can't do much. If the TechSpot article about DDR4 was correct (article here), even DDR4-2400 would offer twice that bandwidth, and given that we don't know what kind of performance is Nintendo targeting, it could be enough for them.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

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