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posted by n1 on Tuesday January 26 2016, @12:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the x-makes-it-better dept.

JEDEC has finalized the GDDR5X SGRAM specification:

The new technology is designed to improve bandwidth available to high-performance graphics processing units without fundamentally changing the memory architecture of graphics cards or memory technology itself, similar to other generations of GDDR, although these new specifications are arguably pushing the phyiscal[sic] limits of the technology and hardware in its current form. The GDDR5X SGRAM (synchronous graphics random access memory) standard is based on the GDDR5 technology introduced in 2007 and first used in 2008. The GDDR5X standard brings three key improvements to the well-established GDDR5: it increases data-rates by up to a factor of two, it improves energy efficiency of high-end memory, and it defines new capacities of memory chips to enable denser memory configurations of add-in graphics boards or other devices. What is very important for developers of chips and makers of graphics cards is that the GDDR5X should not require drastic changes to designs of graphics cards, and the general feature-set of GDDR5 remains unchanged (and hence why it is not being called GDDR6).

[...] The key improvement of the GDDR5X standard compared to the predecessor is its all-new 16n prefetch architecture, which enables up to 512 bit (64 Bytes) per array read or write access. By contrast, the GDDR5 technology features 8n prefetch architecture and can read or write up to 256 bit (32 Bytes) of data per cycle. Doubled prefetch and increased data transfer rates are expected to double effective memory bandwidth of GDDR5X sub-systems. However, actual performance of graphics cards will depend not just on DRAM architecture and frequencies, but also on memory controllers and applications. Therefore, we will need to test actual hardware to find out actual real-world benefits of the new memory.

What purpose does GDDR5X serve if superior 1st and 2nd generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) are around? GDDR5X memory will be cheaper than HBM and its use is more of an evolutionary than revolutionary change from existing GDDR5-based hardware.


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  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday January 26 2016, @03:12PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday January 26 2016, @03:12PM (#294919)

    and just FYI I try to avoid Anandtech, because if you turn off your adblock? Its all Intel ads. I've even read articles where the author admitted that most new triple A titles require a quad core and then promptly recommended an i3 over an FX6300 for a gaming PC!

    At the moment, sure. Last year they had a big AMD sponsorship, to the point that they had an actual AMD section, styled in AMD red. Under neither sponsorship did I find much bias, outside the comments section. For example, if you look at their recent reviews for AMD's A8-7670K [anandtech.com], the review boils down to "AMD still has problems with CPU performance, but if you want to game on a budget, it works great", so they're not being unfair to AMD. And they're honestly reporting on Intel's supply issues [anandtech.com], so they aren't helping Intel on that front either.

    As for the i3 vs. FX6300, neither of them are true quad-cores. Intel, in an uncharacteristic bit of honesty, makes a clear distinction between hardware cores and logical threads. AMD gave their logical threads a bit more dedicated hardware, but they used that to call it a full core, and then call the actual core a "module" (ever wonder why there are no "triple-core" FX chips, like there were in the Phenom II days? It's because it's physically impossible). I could quibble about semantics all day, but instead I'll just refer you to benchmarks - any set of benchmarks, really, will show that the FX6000s benchmarks in the same region as the two-cores-hyperthreaded i3s, not the quad-core i5s. At this point, it might be worth it to grab the i3 just for the wider range of motherboards to choose from, plus the more modern chipset, particularly if you can grab it for a similar price.

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