AMD debuts 2.5D high bandwidth memory stack

AMD has gone ahead of archrival Nvidia to unveil its high-end graphics cards that use DRAM chip stacks to deliver more memory bandwidth and performance on relatively small, low-power boards. AMD has announced four graphics cards at E3, a conference for serious gamers and those who develop for them.

The Radeon R9 300 series is based on AMD's Fiji GPUs and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chip stacks from SK Hynix. "Fiji is the most complex and highest performance GPU we've ever built; it is the first with High Bandwidth Memory," stated AMD CEO Lisa Su.

AMD described the 2.5D HBM stack earlier this month but did not say which GPU would use the next-generation memory developed with SK Hynix. Its flagship Radeon Fury X uses 4GB of HBM memory, delivering up to 512Gb/s of memory bandwidth, an increase of around 63 per cent over the previous generation Radeon R9 290X, principal analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy wrote, to reach a 1.5x improvement in performance per watt.

Lisa Su unveiled the AMD GPU at E3.

The 28nm Fury X is a liquid cooled card with 4,096 stream processors and 64 compute units at clock speeds up to 1.05GHz. Fury X can perform at up to 8.6 GFLOPS, a 65 per cent over the previous generation, to display games at 45fps for 4K and 65fps on future 5K displays.

"The AMD R9 Fury X offers a brand new architecture to entice even gamers with the latest cards to upgrade," Moorhead continued. "AMD's new GPU offerings are part of the company's effort to push for more power efficiency and performance while still adding new and beneficial features with HBM enabling new form factors as well as DX12 and new drivers to improve performance."

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