The new volumetric memory technology that aims to replace DRAM as the main memory in computers has appeared in "metal". Promises of HMC. Able to deliver 320 GB/s of bandwidth sounded too good to be true, but Micron is showing their work. They have shipped the first 2 GB engineering samples capable of 160 GB/s bandwidth. They plan to release the 4 GB samples at the beginning of 2014 and start volume production later the same year. Micron expects that HMC should appear en-masse in consumer devices in 3-4 years. It will be interesting to see if this really catches on at an affordable price, as the most powerful modern iGPUs are limited by DDR3 bandwidth. Having much faster and responsive main memory should be very beneficial for such cases.
Posted 30-09-2013, 03:15
I doubt this will have much impact on gaming any time soon. Not for quite a long time actually.
But video processing. Now that's a whole different kettle of fish. The potential increase in fidelity for pre-rendering is significant. At least, if I understand the technology correctly
Posted 28-09-2013, 18:43
For the dedicated GPUs the difference will be minimal, as their bandwidth to the main memory is limited by PCI-Express, which is ~ 15 GB/s for PCI-E 3.0 and will only be ~ 31 GB/s when PCI-E 4.0 rolls around. It will be more important for the integrated GPUs, which are getting quite strong.
Posted 28-09-2013, 18:30
Good idea, but then I suppose everyone will have to upgrade their whole systems to take advantage of the new memory. So in theory this should allow better looking textures in games, as it will be able to handle the bigger sizes. I will wait and see.