It looks like AMD is confident enough on its HBC (High-Bandwidth Cache) and HBCC (High-Bandwidth Cache Controller) technology, and other assorted improvements to overall Vega memory management, to consider 4 GB as enough memory for high-performance gaming and applications. On a Beijing tech summit, AMD announced that its RX Vega cards (the highest performers in their next generation product stack, which features rebrands of their RX 400 line series of cards to th new RX 500) will come in at 4 GB and 8 GB HBM 2 (512 GB/s) memory amounts. The HBCC looks to ensure that we don't see a repeat of AMD's Fury X video card, which featured first generation HBM (High-Bandwidth memory), at the time limited to 4 GB stacks. But lacking extensive memory management improvements meant that the Fury X sometimes struggled on memory-heavy workloads.

If the company's Vega architecture deep dive is anything to go by, they may be right: remember that AMD put out a graph showing how the memory allocation is almost twice as big as the actual amount of memory used - and its here, with smarter, improved memory management and allocation, that AMD is looking to make do with only 4 GB of video memory (which is still more than enough for most games, mind you). This could be a turn of the screw moment for all that "more is always better" philosophy.

AMD's Ryzen 7 lower than expected performance in some applications seems to stem from a particular problem: memory. Before AMD's Ryzen chips were even out, reports pegged AMD as having confirmed that most of the tweaks and programming for the new architecture had been done in order to improve core performance to its max - at the expense of memory compatibility and performance. Apparently, and until AMD's entire Ryzen line-up is completed with the upcoming Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 processors, the company will be hard at work on improving Ryzen's cache handling and memory latency.

Hardware.fr has done a pretty good job in exploring Ryzen's cache and memory subsystem deficiencies through the use of AIDA 64, in what would otherwise be an exceptional processor design. Namely, the fact that there seems to be some problem with Ryzen's L3 cache and memory subsystem implementation. Paired with the same memory configuration and at the same 3 GHz clocks, for instance, Ryzen's memory tests show memory latency results that are up to 30 ns higher (at 90 ns) than the average latency found on Intel's i7 6900K or even AMD's FX 8350 (both at around 60 ns).