Home Gaming High Bandwidth Memory confirmed for AMD’s new water-cooled GPU

High Bandwidth Memory confirmed for AMD’s new water-cooled GPU

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Nvidia has been making it rain with their launch of their Maxwell cards late last year, enjoying a few months of unrivalled dominance over the GPU market. AMD was always expected to have a response sometime this year, with their new R300 series due sometime in June. As we’ve expected though,  AMD will debut High Bandwidth Memory – and AMD really wants to make a statement with their flagship R9 390X

During their financial analyst day yesterday, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su revealed the company’s plans for their next wave of GPU launches. This included DirectX 12 support, AMD FreeSync support and the debut of High Bandwidth Memory. Though we’ve suspected the new cards would feature HBM, AMD themselves have stated that the new memory technology would only be ready next year – which means the sudden success of Maxwell could’ve forced them into a corner.

Which is probably a great thing for those of you holding out and waiting to see what AMD has to offer. High Bandwidth Memory is a big step into the future, offering memory speeds within the 512GB/s – 1TB/s range. That’s a massive step above the current 336GB/s of a Titan Black, which is still stuck on regular GDDR5 memory bandwidth.

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HBM allows memory bandwidth on the GPU to be blown wide open, which comes in handy when trying to render games at higher resolutions (as well as VR). AMD is clearly aiming at the 4K crowd here – where a 8GB stacked memory buffer and faster speeds will definitely take the crown over anything Nvidia has on the market at the moment. The inclusion of HBM is also allowing AMD to cut down power consumption and create smaller cards, as they stack the memory on the same package as the GPU.

The guys over at WCCFTech managed to get a small look at the new R9 390X, which looks like it will ship with a reference water cooling block as well. The design is said to be half the length of the current R9 295X2 flagship.

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AMD has promised a lot more information regarding the new line at Computex and E3 next month, with a probably launch at the end of June. If you’re looking to upgrade, give it a month. I think you’ll want to see what AMD has to offer.

Last Updated: May 7, 2015

17 Comments

  1. TEAM RED!

    Reply

  2. Blood Emperor Trevor

    May 7, 2015 at 09:19

    Hopefully I win the Megarom Witcher 3 competition, selling that Xbone would help afford one of those. Ag who am I kidding, it’ll be well out of my price range even then lol.

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief

      May 7, 2015 at 09:20

      XBAWKS IS MIIIIIINE! (Will enable more gaming time for me with mrs and daughter playing on the bawks)

      Reply

  3. Hammersteyn

    May 7, 2015 at 09:20

  4. Uberutang

    May 7, 2015 at 09:22

    Team green will release the same fast if it has a huge impact to gaming, but I suspect the fancy new ram will be a bit pricey…at first

    Reply

  5. Blood Emperor Trevor

    May 7, 2015 at 09:28

    • FoxOneZA

      May 7, 2015 at 10:51

      And a new commitment to high-end PC’s. Rumors are that we maybe looking at 16 core CPU’s when the Zen range launches in 2016.

      Reply

  6. Maxiviper117

    May 7, 2015 at 09:28

    Let’s not forget that by the time these AMD cards come out next year with HBM, Nvidia’s plans for their codename Pascal GPU next year also having stacked memory. And up to 32 total ram on a single card.

    Reply

    • Alessandro Barbosa

      May 7, 2015 at 09:30

      These new AMD cards are out late next month/ early July though 🙂

      Reply

      • Hammersteyn

        May 7, 2015 at 09:31

        Maybe if I start saving now I can afford on next year…. maybe by December?

        Reply

      • Maxiviper117

        May 7, 2015 at 09:33

        “AMD themselves have stated that the new memory technology would only be ready next year ” – Alessandro Barbosa

        Reply

        • RustedFaith

          May 7, 2015 at 10:28

          The fanboy is strong with this one rofl.

          Its quite cute.

          Reply

          • Maxiviper117

            May 7, 2015 at 19:37

            There’s no fan boy mentality when there’s a clear distinction little boy, there’s a reason Nvidia is leading.

            You must therefore be the amd fanboy

    • RustedFaith

      May 7, 2015 at 10:27

      Sorry to get in the way of your conspiricy theory but the card is being released in June witch is less than a month.

      You can put the tinfoil hat on again now.

      Reply

      • Maxiviper117

        May 7, 2015 at 19:41

        Do your research plonker, Nvidia Pascal, couldn’t care what amd has to offer in the next few months.

        Reply

  7. Lord Chaos

    May 7, 2015 at 09:39

    I need a volunteer.

    I have the bath, ice and scalpel ready.

    Reply

  8. Kikmi

    May 7, 2015 at 11:16

    Yes but will it actually perform? I keep hearing about all these great technical innovations from team red but never anything substantial or game changing. Perhaps with HBM they can attain those goals. Its great that team green is the undisputed king but good competition drives tech and right now no one is doing anything worthwhile other than dropping TDP.

    Reply

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