A much faster RAM technology is on the horizon – Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (consisting of Samsung, Micron, IBM and others) has finalized the specifications of their new approach to memory. Memory bandwidth between different chips is often limited by the relatively far distance the signals have to travel. By stacking memory chips on top of each other, much shorter wires can be used, allowing increasing bandwidth tremendously while reducing the power consumption at the same time.
HMC will use the stacked memory, just like the future Nvidia Volta GPUs. The first version of HMC should offer bandwidth up to 320GB/s, which is over 20 times faster than the fastest DDR3 configurations. HMC Consortium also promises that the first memory using HMC should appear on the market by the end of this year. The costs are unknown at the moment, but it is reasonable to expect that it will come to high performance supercomputers first.
Posted 21-04-2013, 04:22
That makes more sense. I guess I just thought we'd have heard more about it is all.
Anyway, whatever the case. It's on its way now and that's what matters
Posted 20-04-2013, 23:37
I think it was attempted many times in the past, but only inside the laboratories.
Posted 20-04-2013, 23:30
@NAG I expect volt tolerance and power consumption played a major role in the delay as well. Though the former is tied in with cooling and such. It was more of a rhetorical question. But still, I am somewhat surprised it's a method that hadn't at least been attempted before now
Posted 20-04-2013, 23:28
@Stuntman Yeah, I hear what you're saying. Not disputing that it could, and will, lead to that, I'm sceptical about the timeframe. Like I said, it's the cost that's the main limiter these days. Until the focus on cost versus return shifts, nothing major is going to happen. Essentially, publishers are crippling creativity by banking on the safe bet. That's why I'm so relieved to see the overwhelming success of Kickstarter's as a development model. Giving the money directly to the Devs to work for themselves gives them so much more creative freedom
Posted 20-04-2013, 23:08
The basic idea was always easy. Implementing it in a hardware with sufficient cooling, external bandwidth and at a competitive price - that is a hard part.
Posted 20-04-2013, 23:01
think in 2-3 years time though. Ram isn't a huge factor in performance atm is because the technology hasnt progressed as much. All that changed was the size of the brick. So if they are able to achieve at least half they say that would be a massive gain especially considering that with big amount of ram you will be able to load whole world onto ram.
Posted 20-04-2013, 22:52
I don't think RAM is going to be a massive influence on gaming for the time being really. Not in the way it has been in the past. The cost and time involved in making something so massive to really push 8gb is impractical for now. Which isn't such a bad thing. Now, when it comes to video editing...now I'm salivating
Posted 20-04-2013, 21:40
This might be the thing that makes the consoles very outdated again where the amount of ram and DDR5 for PS4 will just not cut it.
Posted 20-04-2013, 19:35
This one of those moments where I scratch my head and ask "why did no-one thing of this sooner?"