Allen
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Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,854
Ohio USA
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Samsung Can Double Their HBM2 Manufacturing Capacity But Supply Issues Would Still Persist as Demand Exceeds Production
The Samsung developed HBM2 which is known as Aquabolt is the fastest spec’d memory solution to date with a capacity of 8GB per stack and up to 307 GB/s of bandwidth per stack..
Now, this is an issue for professional and high-end graphics cards such as AMD Vega and NVIDIA Volta lineup which currently only uses HBM2 memory but DRAM makers, including Samsung are working on the next best thing for consumer grade graphics cards known as GDDR6.
Currently, RX Vega 64 performs equivalently or slightly better than GTX 1080 in games -- but, it costs about $80 more today.
Among the reasons Vega costs more is HBM2 memory cost -- which is going to stay high for a while. AMD did not have that in mind when they decided to use HBM2 in RX Vega. Since AMD deliberately tries to win "bang per buck", maybe they will use GDDR6 in some new cards next year (that would have been HBM2).
Also, while commenting on reasons for the cost difference, the AMD Vega GPU chips (both Vega 64 & 56) have nearly twice as many transistors as GTX1080. Those extra transistors along with HBM2 give Vega an advantage in money-making "compute" activities -- so, cryptocurrency miners drove up the price.
As noted above in this thread, Nvidia has too many chips on hand which is driving the cost of Nvidia GPUs way down. Exception, GTX 1080 TI cost is staying relatively high -- possibly because it has no direct gaming competition. No competition is no good (to twist a phrase often used in this thread).
