SK Hynix will begin mass production of 4 GB HBM2 memory stacks soon:
SK Hynix has quietly added its HBM Gen 2 memory stacks to its public product catalog earlier this month, which means that the start of mass production should be imminent. The company will first offer two types of new memory modules with the same capacity, but different transfer-rates, targeting graphics cards, HPC accelerators and other applications. Over time, the HBM2 family will get broader.
SK Hynix intends to initially offer its clients 4 GB HBM2 4Hi stack KGSDs (known good stack dies) based on 8 Gb DRAM devices. The memory devices will feature a 1024-bit bus as well as 1.6 GT/s (H5VR32ESM4H-12C) and 2.0 GT/s (H5VR32ESM4H-20C) data-rates, thus offering 204 GB/s and 256 GB/s peak bandwidth per stack.
Samsung has already manufactured 4 GB stacks. Eventually, there will also be 2 GB and 8 GB stacks available.
Previously: AMD Shares More Details on High Bandwidth Memory
Samsung Announces Mass Production of HBM2 DRAM
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has shared more details about the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in its upcoming GPUs.
HBM in a nutshell takes the wide & slow paradigm to its fullest. Rather than building an array of high speed chips around an ASIC to deliver 7Gbps+ per pin over a 256/384/512-bit memory bus, HBM at its most basic level involves turning memory clockspeeds way down – to just 1Gbps per pin – but in exchange making the memory bus much wider. How wide? That depends on the implementation and generation of the specification, but the examples AMD has been showcasing so far have involved 4 HBM devices (stacks), each featuring a 1024-bit wide memory bus, combining for a massive 4096-bit memory bus. It may not be clocked high, but when it's that wide, it doesn't need to be.
AMD will be the only manufacturer using the first generation of HBM, and will be joined by NVIDIA in using the second generation in 2016. HBM2 will double memory bandwidth over HBM1. The benefits of HBM include increased total bandwidth (from 320 GB/s for the R9 290X to 512 GB/s in AMD's "theoretical" 4-stack example) and reduced power consumption. Although HBM1's memory bandwidth per watt is tripled compared to GDDR5, the memory in AMD's example uses a little less than half the power (30 W for the R9 290X down to 14.6 W) due to the increased bandwidth. HBM stacks will also use 5-10% as much area of the GPU to provide the same amount of memory that GDDR5 would. That could potentially halve the size of the GPU:
By AMD's own estimate, a single HBM-equipped GPU package would be less than 70mm × 70mm (4900mm2), versus 110mm × 90mm (9900mm2) for R9 290X.
HBM will likely be featured in high-performance computing GPUs as well as accelerated processing units (APUs). HotHardware reckons that Radeon 300-series GPUs featuring HBM will be released in June.
Samsung has announced the mass production of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) packages using the second generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) interface.
AMD was the first and only company to introduce products using HBM1. AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X GPUs featured 4 gigabytes of HBM1 using four 1 GB packages. Both AMD and Nvidia will introduce GPUs equipped with HBM2 memory this year. Samsung's first HBM2 packages will contain 4 GB of memory each, and the press release states that Samsung intends to manufacture 8 GB HBM2 packages within the year. GPUs could include 8 GB of HBM2 using half of the die space used by AMD's Fury X, or just one-quarter of the die space if 8 GB HBM2 packages are used next year. Correction: HBM2 packages may be slightly physically larger than HBM1 packages. For example, SK Hynix will produce a 7.75 mm × 11.87 mm (91.99 mm2) HBM2 package, compared to 5.48 mm × 7.29 mm (39.94 mm2) HBM1 packages.
The 4GB HBM2 package is created by stacking a buffer die at the bottom and four 8-gigabit (Gb) core dies on top. These are then vertically interconnected by TSV holes and microbumps. A single 8Gb HBM2 die contains over 5,000 TSV holes, which is more than 36 times that of a 8Gb TSV DDR4 die, offering a dramatic improvement in data transmission performance compared to typical wire-bonding based packages.
Samsung's new DRAM package features 256GBps of bandwidth, which is double that of a HBM1 DRAM package. This is equivalent to a more than seven-fold increase over the 36GBps bandwidth of a 4Gb GDDR5 DRAM chip, which has the fastest data speed per pin (9Gbps) among currently manufactured DRAM chips. Samsung's 4GB HBM2 also enables enhanced power efficiency by doubling the bandwidth per watt over a 4Gb-GDDR5-based solution, and embeds ECC (error-correcting code) functionality to offer high reliability.
TSV refers to through-silicon via, a vertical electrical connection used to build 3D chip packages such as High Bandwidth Memory.
Update: HBM2 has been formalized in JEDEC's JESD235A standard, and Anandtech has an article with additional technical details.
Previously:
AMD Teases x86 Improvements, High Bandwidth Memory GPUs
AMD Shares More Details on High Bandwidth Memory
Samsung Mass Produces 128 GB DDR4 Server Memory
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:51AM
The memory devices will feature a 1024-bit bus as well as 1.6 GT/s (H5VR32ESM4H-12C) and 2.0 GT/s (H5VR32ESM4H-20C) data-rates, thus offering 204 GB/s and 256 GB/s peak bandwidth per stack.
that means there are 1024 lines in parallel. for comparison, sticks of system RAM use 64 lines.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @03:07AM
When does MS catch up? Seems like a long way to go from Win32 to Win64...to Win1024... What's the roadmap, do they stop at 256 or 512??
(Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:02AM
So 16 times the length of your existing ram sockets then?
That's a wide laptop you got there son.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @04:10PM
Most sticks of system ram use 128 lines because they are 64 bits and two channels. Newer processors can use up to 256 lines because they have four channels. Most new GPUs use 512 lines or more because they use even more channels to increase bandwidth. Some even used 32 bit internally but even more channels, as bandwidth was more important than bit depth. Here, they use the same number of channels as most modern GPUs, but each channel is 128 bits wide.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:25AM
There is a few industrial applications where no matter how much speed you throw at it its never enough but as we've seen time and time again you really need the consumer market to make most of this stuff worth producing at a reasonable price and....we've just about his the limits unless some magical new way of programming comes along.
Hell you look at what most are doing with a PC? A first gen C2Q or Phenom I isn't even really getting to stretch its legs and while most systems I sell have 8Gb because...well fuck it RAM is cheap how much of that is actually getting used? Pretty damned little. Hell I'm a gamer and even playing FPS and huge MMOs I don't think I've ever reached using even half of my 16GB of RAM and with new games costing closer and closer to 100 MILLION USD just to produce? The days of making games that require an uber-PC just to run are rapidly coming to a close. Hell my R9 280 is a year and a half old (and the design itself goes back to the HD7870) yet I can have the bling just cranked on my games and still hit 60 FPS with planes falling out of the sky and fireballs everywhere.
The problem is the ability to program for all this shit? It just isn't there, we got assloads of cores, shitloads or RAM and huge piles of VRAM yet most programs really aren't anymore capable of using this stuff than when P4s were the norm. Even new tech like Vulkan can only help so much because so much of our programming works in a A>B>C model where splitting up the load just doesn't work.
So until we come up with a way to make programs take advantage of all this shit as easily as writing a "hello world" program? Most of this stuff is just gonna be sitting in a PC twiddling its thumbs with fuck all to do.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:12AM
At a minimum, this memory can be used to lower power consumption and make chip designs smaller (especially GPUs). High-end GPUs certainly can use the extra memory bandwidth, and boosting that to 1 TB/s removes that bottleneck for a while.
High performance computing can certainly use more memory and bandwidth. Intel's Xeon Phi chips [nextplatform.com] now include 16 GB of High Bandwidth Memory, and so does the NVIDIA Tesla P100 [anandtech.com].
Closer to consumers, you have rumors of AMD using HBM in upcoming APUs [wccftech.com], although it's still not clear if it will make it into mobile or desktop APUs. AMD's APUs have benefited from faster memory before, and they could do it again. Even the 32-core Zen server/datacenter/HPC chip may have on-board HBM.
We recently had a huge poll discussion about the need for RAM [soylentnews.org]. Many of our users could do something with more than 8 GB, including me.
Plenty of computers could run better with more cores or more RAM. My $100 dual-core with 2 GB of RAM could use both.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:14PM
FPS is pretty low performance stuff. Try maxed out modded minecraft for a real hardware challenge.
Although the bar is higher I'd agree there still is a bar in that what would I want to do in modded minecraft with 100x the graphic bus or 100x the CPU or 100x the memory, well, I haven't the faintest idea. Merely making thaumcraft 100x more grindy and complicated isn't it. I don't want to think about a bigreactors reactor thats 100x bigger. I guess TFC could be 100x grindier and TFC players would lap it up like kittens.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:29PM
If you are looking for a game to melt your computer, try Doom (the new one). My R9 290 and higher-end A-10 can't get above 15 FPS. The game looks like a lot of fun though. Might even have a story-line?
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(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday August 03 2016, @07:50AM
I don't really play FPS games much anymore, I find them kinda boring actually. Maybe because I'm getting older but I prefer games like War Thunder where I can fly all the great planes of WWII and loop and zoom and watch fighters burn like fireballs in the sky and drive all the rare tanks like the Nb:Fz and SMK and turn battlefields into black smoking fields of death using nothing but a primitive gunsight and knowledge of physics to calculate shell drop on the fly.
If you haven't tried it you ought to give it a go, if you can kick some ass they have events where you can win vehicles that will never be offered for sale or be in the tech tree ever. About another week I'll have this sweet baby [warthunder.com] added to my hangar, it'll go nicely with my Wirraway in low tier fun as hell fighter bombers.
But I bet your bottleneck is the A-10, they are really made more for HTPCs than gaming rigs. I have the FX-8320E which hits 4.1Ghz without OCing and I can easily hit 4.5-4.6Ghz on air so I seriously doubt my CPU would be a bottleneck. If you keep an eye out you can grab an FX-8xxx chip for around $100 and IMHO its money well spent, when you don't need the extra horses it downclocks to 1.4Ghz and with 8 cores it'll pretty much stay there for most day to day task but when you DO need the extra power? They'll kick it up quite nicely.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday August 03 2016, @01:45PM
I think you're right with the CPU bottleneck. It wasn't originally going to be a gaming machine, just a small programming machine. Really wanted to go AM3+ for FX but couldn't find a mini-itx motherboard. Had to go FM2 : / Saving up money for the Zen release later this year (please don't delay!).
That certainly is a strange plane, hah. I imagine the lesser known vehicles rarely get included in any game. If you are also into WW1 vehicles then Battlefield 1 might be something you'll be interested in: https://www.battlefield.com/games/battlefield-1/vehicles [battlefield.com]
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(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 04 2016, @12:46AM
The problem with the BF series is it really is just a FPS with vehicles added as an afterthought. If its anything like previous games the physics are REALLY arcade like, with the ability to pull shit that the real life planes would never be able to pull off in a million years.
I prefer my fights more realistic, nothing like using a B-25 like a flying battleship, trading blows with a FW190 or A6M3, and then while the fighter becomes a flaming wreck nursing your damaged bomber back to the base like something out of Memphis Belle. I have managed to bring a P-38 back to base from 12k away on one dying engine by nursing the throttle and figuring up a glide path on the fly, got my B-25 home with the tail controls completely shot and half the crew dead, and even managed to hold a cap zone for more than 10 minutes against the entire enemy column using an M3 Lee that had a blown track and no engine like something out of Fury, it was fucking amazing.
I've tried Rise Of Flight and War Thunder has some pre war biplanes so I've had some time behind the stick of those early planes....they are just not for me. This is how I know Battlefield will be arcade as hell because IRL those early planes? The guns were absolute SHIT, we're talking weaker than your average rifle round, prone to jamming, you had to practically kiss the enemy to get a kill and if you didn't hit the pilot or the engine you could give it up, those old canvas birds could be shot all to hell and keep on flying.
Nope for me 37-45 is the sweet spot for planes and tanks, hell I have a half a dozen jets in my hangar and never take 'em out because I find too much speed just as boring as too little. Plus I have a soft spot in my heart for crazy derpy shit and WWII was like a mad scientist lab of insane-o vehicles, from double barrel tanks like Nb:Fz and SMK to monsters like KV-2 and StuH-42 and from the most agile of planes like the A6M and Spitfire to the USSR and Germany and their "hey lets see how much of a BFG we can jam into a plane!" like the 37mm in the Yak-3P and IL2 to the bomber killers like the 45mm Yak-9K and the BF109 Gs with 30mm gunpods filled with Minegeschoss which were like throwing hand grenades.
Its just too fun to play around with all these vehicles for me to want to jump into an MMO FPS with arcade gameplay when I'm used to flying realistic and simulation, thanks anyway.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.