If we get reviews on the 17th it might not be a paper launch after all.

Gonna be really tough for me to hold back and wait for the 1080ti or Titan.

Hopefully it's a hard launch.
Hopefully nVidia' beating AMD's Vega launch will make AMD push Vega a little harder. :)

Unfortunately history does not backup your claim.

New feature sizes are always more expensive, untill the fabs get a better idea of power characterisitics and how the materials react and even improvements to the patterning and light. Yields will then increase, costs will decrease.

7nm is expensive right now and is thus only used for simple structures that have minimal leakage, like NAND, that will change over time.

Every other node has ALWAYS been expensive when it debuted, 28nm, 40nm, 32nm, 90nm they all brought with them issues related to costs and yields untill they got a better idea of the process involved.

Here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2937/7
As you can see even 40nm was plagued with issues, today it will be extremely cheap to use, to a point.

AMD did double performance, or close enough. Here is the benchmarks, argument over.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1495?vs=1513

Performance has changed since 2015 though, Fury has certainly gotten a bigger focus in later driver releases to take advantage of the newer GCN nuances.
http://wccftech.com/amd-r9-fury-x-performance-ahead-nvidia-980-ti-latest-drivers/

Power efficieny gains weren't as pronounced between 40nm and 28nm because die sizes kinda exploded. AMD for instance went from 2.6 Billion transisters with the Radeon 6970 to 4.3 Billion with the 7970.
The 6970 built on 40nm though is about as fast as the 7850 built on 28nm in gaming tasks, which both have a similar amount of transisters, the 7850 though will use a good 100-150 watts less of energy.

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1076?vs=1061

Having 4Gb is certainly a hinderance over the long term.
However... They were limited technically, HBM was new, AMD was on the cutting edge, they wanted to repeat the same success they did with the Radeon 4000 series, unfortunately HBM wasn't there all the way.
HBM2 things will change, larger capacities, more bandwidth... And then in 2017/2018 we should see the successor to HBM.

AMD will also be releasing a 200-300w APU with HBM, which should run rings around the PS4.

Although the consoles aren't enough to make AMD profitable... It does give them one thing. Cash flow, cash flow can be just as important as profits as cash flow can be used to leverage new financing, it also gives a company a degree of financial stability.

Zen though, although I wish it would beat Intel... Probably won't. It will make up for lost ground though.... To be fair, AMD doesn't really need to beat Intel, they just need to be "Good enough" at the right price... And right now IMHO anyone who buys an AMD CPU is insane in 2016, Zen should change that.

It also gives AMD experience in that technology, experience that might hopefully give them a leg-up over nVidia with a HBM2 implementation.

And the reason why it isn't being used is because nothing is ready to use it. :P You can't just drop it onto our current GPU's and call it a day unfortunately, you need to make modifications to the memory controller... PCB layouts need to change to account for the different traces and the interposer... Which is why it is releasing with the new Enthusiast level cards.
GDDR5X will also have a bandwidth bump over GDDR5, so cards with less hardware won't need HBM and nVidia/AMD/Partners can take a bit more profit home.

The big problem of HBM is that using the 1024-bit bus per stack take so much traces that AMD and Nvidia are only able to use 4 modules. Even the GP100 was only using 4 stacks, but of HBM2.

I wonder what that HBM successor might be. Has anyone heard anything about it?

That APU you talk about... I find it hard to believe it, to be honest. Not only because the first mention of it came from Fudzilla (at least, if you're talking about that 16 Zen cores + Greenland + HBM rumor) but because not even AMD would launch such a power hungry APU. It would need to come bundled with a CLC unit and that would make it too much expensive to make it a worth buy over a separate CPU+GPU, that could use less power and be even faster.

The traces aren't really the problem. That is what the interposer is for.

The traces aren't really the problem. That is what the interposers are for.
However... Interposers are also built at 65nm and they do cost a fair chunk of coin, you could technically have two stacks of HBM to each interposer for a total of 8 if the Interposer was designed to accomodate it, but they aren't. It's one thing to do HBM version 2, doing an Interposer version 2 on a different fabrication process in order to accomidate multiple stacks is a different game entirely.

But then Costs will also blow out, only so much you can do per market segment, HBM is already expensive.

As for HBM's successor, AMD has just labelled it as "Next Gen memory". I would hazard a guess that as HBM is seen as "wide" AMD/JEDEC/Memory companies might go for a faster approach and take advantage of HBM's inherent advantages and drive up the speed.

As for the APU.
Anandtech at one point asked it's reader base what users wanted to see out of AMD and AMD was actually reading and responding to some of the comments... And without question everyone wanted a beefy APU with built-in GDDR5 or better Ram, AMD had actually done something similar with the 780 chipsets where they would bundle 64Mb-128Mb of DDR3 Ram for the motherboards graphics.
So AMD knows there is demand, at-least in the enthusiast community.

Now the APU in question isn't for your every day consumer, it is for the HPC market, Aka. Server grade stuff that already uses 16+ CPU cores and beefy GPU's for compute, it just happens to be that AMD sells both seperate one as Opteron the other as FireGL.
AMD themselves have already confirmed the existence of such a product, but what kind of hardware still remains to be seen, but keep in mind it is for the HPC market, it's likely to be extremely chunky, they don't typically do low-end stuff. ;)

Thus... Cooling isn't going to be an issue, these will likely come complete as a "compute add-in board" or an all-in-on motherboard with tons of ports for drives.

And even then, you don't need to go liquid cooling to cool 200-300w, a motherboard allows for a larger surface area than a GPU and GPU's have been cooling such wattages like that for years thanks to heat pipes, vapour chamber etc' designs.

Awesome then! I don't log in everyday so I can't keep track of topics. Thanks!

Cooling is an issue when all those 200 or 300W of heat come from a single chip the size of an APU. There are no CPU heatsinks designed to tame such a monster, which is why I talked about AMD having to go with a CLC unit to cool such thing.

But it doesn't really matter, because such an APU for the HTC market won't go into retail for us to buy it.

That said, there was a rumor a couple of months ago of AMD working on a Bristol Ridge APU with 16CUs, that would put it almost on the same level as an XboxOne (because with DDR4, the bandwidth would be quite lower). For something more powerful, we'll have to wait for Zen and Pascal, well into next year.

*Edit*

I found the rumor: http://wccftech.com/amd-bristol-ridge-16-cu-apu/

Well you could if you were using the Latest Topics ;)

One day is just about 1 page and a half.

Ashes of The Singularity benchmarks with the GTX 1080 and other unreleased Nvidia and AMD cards, have been leaked.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 DirectX 12 Benchmarks in Ashes of The Singularity Revealed

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-dx12-benchmarks/#ixzz48BBQJtVh

NVIDIA GTX 1080, AMD Polaris 10/11 Ashes of Singularity DirectX12 benchmarks leaked

http://videocardz.com/59725/nvidia-gtx-1080-polaris-10-11-directx12-benchmarks

I don't know how the AotS benchmark works, but feel free to comment if you can understand it.

*Edit*

Here's a ghetto unboxing

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 'Founder's Edition' (Ghetto) Unboxing

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7700/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-founders-edition-ghetto-unboxing/index.html

This is starting to get exciting I can't wait for new NV and AMD cards to hit the market. At this point obviously we have to keep in mind that the claims we heard are PR crap and nothing more - there's half a page of fine print after every "twice as powerful as the Titan" Still, I hope the new cards will not only be more power efficient, but also more powerful. I'm so happy I've waited and can't wait to see the benchmarks and finally getting my hands on my new dream GPU

Oh, if you are talking about how devs now have access to similar APIs on all platforms and multiplatform developer tools so they basically make one build for all platforms, then you are correct. Exclusives wouldn't even be about incentives, but simply because they also have a more specialized build instead of a generic one.

I believe that, this gen, the ports are much better, and I'm talking about PC -> consoles and consoles -> PC. The APIs are more similar and multiplat dev tools are way better, so everyone will have more games in the end. But that's more of a reflex of companies figuring out that if dev costs went up like they did last gen, the costs would be prohibitive. So devs now can focus on a "single" build and just tune minimum aspects for each version. And that's OK. The only way to push visuals now is having direct funding to to so (first party) or having direct funding for that (Star Citizen).