Monday, November 21st 2011
Noises About Radeon HD 7900 Series with XDR2 Memory Grow
As early as in September, we heard reports of AMD toying with Rambus XDR2 memory on its next generation of high-performance GPUs. Apart from our own community's response, that news met with a wall of skepticism as it was deficient in plausibility. New reports from Chinese websites have raised the topic again with fresh rumors that AMD will attempt to implement XDR2 on some of its next-generation ultra-high end products after all. XDR2, according to Rambus, can transport twice the amount of data per clock as GDDR5.
Apparently AMD and Rambus have had much more cordial relations with each other, than other companies the latter engaged in patent disputes with. In 2006, AMD settled outstanding disputes with Rambus by willing to pay licensing costs for certain technologies claimed by Rambus, turning a leaf in the relations between the two. What Chinese sources are suggesting now, is that AMD will design its high-end GPU (codename: "Tahiti") in a way that will let it support both GDDR5 and XDR2. Certain higher-end SKUs based on Tahiti will use XDR2, while the slightly more cost-effective SKUs will use GDDR5.
In related news, other sources told TechPowerUp that AMD could adopt a "top-to-bottom" strategy with the high-end portion of its next-generation of products. This means that AMD could launch the dual-GPU "New Zealand" graphics card first, followed by single-GPU SKUs.
Source:
Mydrivers
Apparently AMD and Rambus have had much more cordial relations with each other, than other companies the latter engaged in patent disputes with. In 2006, AMD settled outstanding disputes with Rambus by willing to pay licensing costs for certain technologies claimed by Rambus, turning a leaf in the relations between the two. What Chinese sources are suggesting now, is that AMD will design its high-end GPU (codename: "Tahiti") in a way that will let it support both GDDR5 and XDR2. Certain higher-end SKUs based on Tahiti will use XDR2, while the slightly more cost-effective SKUs will use GDDR5.
In related news, other sources told TechPowerUp that AMD could adopt a "top-to-bottom" strategy with the high-end portion of its next-generation of products. This means that AMD could launch the dual-GPU "New Zealand" graphics card first, followed by single-GPU SKUs.
64 Comments on Noises About Radeon HD 7900 Series with XDR2 Memory Grow
But looking at rambus financial situation, they have to start selling their work at a reasonable cost.
XDR is used in Playstation 3 consoles.
So AMD are going for that "difference" to make their products more appealing that just another generic GPU.
Either that or this stuff really does work.
Just to put it simply...
Beats a costly 512-Bit PCB, crammed with 2Gb of ram... That looks to be the trend for the competition and we know how AMD likes to buck the status quo. If it works it's good for the consumer.That wasn't so much from the readers and respondents...
we should actually be saying DDR2 SDRAM or DDR3 SDRAM.
I would love to see a video tested using GTA V or SR3 with XDR2.
Pretty sure ECH was thinking about this when mentioning PCI-E. I am sure he was wondering is PCIe bandwidth was enough to take full advantage of the bandwidth offered by XDR2.
Not all users use VGAs for gaming..GPGPU has it's purposes too.