AMD GPUs will get stacked dram at the end of 2014

AMD is expected to introduce Volcanic Island 2.0 GPUs in the second half of 2014 that use stacked dram, which should provide more memory bandwidth and lower power consumption. This is evident from a presentation from AMD, which recently came online.

A user of the overclock.net forum recently published some pages from a presentation showing AMD plans to apply high bandwidth memory to future video cards. The presentation is from December 2013, but does not appear to have been published before.

Stacked memory should lead to lower energy consumption, while more bandwidth becomes available. There would be two 128-bit channels per dram chip, bringing the total bus width with four stacked dram chips to 1024 bit. In a graph in the presentation the energy consumption is expressed in ‘bandwidth per watt’ and this shows that hbm is almost three times as efficient as gddr5 memory on a 512-bit bus. According to the user, AMD will use the new memory configuration with the Volcanic Islands 2.0 GPUs and the new video cards will be released at the end of 2014.

A faster version of the R9 290X will also be available before the end of the year, videocardz said. One of AMD’s partners, which builds video cards, has told the website that AMD’s R9 290X will be replaced “soon” by a faster video card. The new AMD card would be faster than Nvidia’s GTX 780 Ti.