Friday, July 15th 2016
SK Hynix to Ship HBM2 Memory by Q3-2016
Korean memory and NAND flash giant SK Hynix announced that it will have HBM2 memory ready for order within Q3-2016 (July-September). The company will ship 4 gigabyte HBM2 stacks in the 4 Hi-stack (4-die stack) form-factor, in two speeds - 2.00 Gbps (256 GB/s per stack), bearing model number H5VR32ESM4H-20C; and 1.60 Gbps (204 GB/s per stack), bearing model number H5VR32ESM4H-12C. With four such stacks, graphics cards over a 4096-bit HBM2 interface, graphics cards with 16 GB of total memory can be built.
Source:
SK Hynix Q3 Catalog
77 Comments on SK Hynix to Ship HBM2 Memory by Q3-2016
Nvidia's cards since their 900 series have been doing more than well in memory bandwidth. I think the source behind the performance jump they made with their 900 series cards back 2014 is their delta color compression implementation, which as apposed to AMD's DCC implementation, is not entirely lossless.
Nvidia has been approximating color values when pixel deltas are "very small", saving a lot of bandwidth and speeding up computation in the process.
If you called Micro-Center when the RX 480 was released you'd quickly realize that the RX 480 had 10 times more volume than the GTX 1080 and 1070. 10 times more and they are still sold out everywhere should tell you how good of a card the RX 480 is. With the recent doom and tombraider patches that add Vulkan and DX 12 it's obvious that AMD cards smoke Nvidia when it comes to new APIs. The RX 480 beating the GTX 1080 in doom is just embaressing for Nvidia.
What you have not considered is that the Nordic countries spend a lot more on high-end components than the rest of the world. RX 480 is simply too expensive here for what it brings to the table. If you are lucky you can buy a RX 480 for equivalent ~310$, while Nvidias cards a closer to their MSRP.
Here is the link:
www.nordichardware.se/nyheter/geforce-gtx-1080-saljer-10-ganger-battre-radeon-rx-480.html
The reference RX 480 has been pretty much a failure over here, just because of the pricing.
While I always wonder how there a justification when people in different region blame the manufactures for the pricing of products Like one manufacture is saying let's try making better margins in the economic region while, the competition is thinking let's worse margins and sell at lower prices. If there's a significant discrepancy in the pricing against the MSRP (USD) it's tariffs, shipping, distributors, taxes, and sellers that are the major culprit.
RX 480 is abnormaly priced compared to other products, including AMDs previous cards.
I don't know if you'd put a lot of faith in a article 10 days after the RX 480 releasing with even the author Anton Karmehed already indicating the site he writes for offer a criticizing review? A unmanned distributor said... And yea no one in their right mind would buy a RX480 at 2,535 Krona, $295 USD or 25% over MSRP.
So a day later and this is written Anton Karmehed; here he's saying the Asus 1080 STIX is 7990 kronor that's $930 USD... up from 7490 kronor $872 USD! That way up from a $700 MSRP Founders Edition of $699 or what should be 6016 kronor.
www.nordichardware.se/nyheter/priser-pa-geforce-gtx-1080-och-gtx-1070-sverige-okar.html
Overpriced or out-of-stock we should just not touch them, and they'll come around to their senses. Heck the best deal today is a PowerColor 380X PCS+ 380X for $150 after $20 Rebate and 10% code at Newegg... That's only 1290 kronor!
So I don't know what's going on there. There is really low margins on the cards from the retailers.
Response to your edit:
What you have to consider is our 25% tax on items. It has never happened, but MSRP are usually matched, so if something has a 699 USD MSRP we almost always get a retail price of minimum 6999 SEK. Asus and the like also raised their prices by around 300-500 SEK becuase of the USD rising.
The GTX 1080 is still "cheaper" than other high-end cards like the 980 Ti was at launch.
My 980 Ti Classified cost around 8500 SEK at relase for example. That's why GTX 1080 sells.
The 380X sells for around 2300 SEK for comparsion.
What's that saying from Hamlet that Marcellus spouted...
It is far far far too early to call the RX 480 is a failure just based on a very early report. That's like saying the Nordic countries don't like saving money.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-now-available.222805/#post-3464292
That just doesn't seem to be a lot of sales compared to other areas of the world.
But it only makes sense to put HBM on a chip that actually can benefit from it. We need to wait for ZEN and see what it does.
I believe AMD had priority on HBM2 since it had a contributing role into designing the interposer that's used on Fury X chips.
Pushing more data at once..sure, ok, did gpu's run into bandwith limits? are they now unchained so to speak?
But it did not happen, the prices are too high and other options are more viable. This won't change for quite some time.
Im not saying the card itself is a failure, im saying that everything regarding its launch was a failure over here. Im sure percentage-wise that we buy a lot more GPUs than the average country. For example, when GTX Titan was released the Nordics were a priority market where the cards was shipped first. Yeah, for some reason.
If you check the most sold GPUs per store, almost everything is just Nvidia. And it is still 970s and 960s that are in the top. I don't find any correlation?
AMDs marketing has been non-existant, we have the cards but very few are being sold. Why? Because people only hear about Nvidia.
GDDR5 is at it limits, with exception of GDDRX5. In a few ways to be honest. Extra power requirements, a larger PCB and a pretty thick memory controller required to use all 8 or even 16 chips at the same time.
This makes a GFX-card in general more expensive, compared to high-end chips with HBM. You dont need to design coolers that cool front and back of the card as well, you only have to focus on both GPU / HBM and VRM.
This also opens doors for AMD to develop a ZEN CPU for either consoles, servermarket or complete SOC's that already have memory on top of it compared to external DDR4 slot for example.
I'm not sure why RX 480 is so expensive in Sweden, that price increase would definitely take away the value of what is supposed to be the low end tier of the GPU market.
It's interesting that you say GTX 1080s are close to the MSRP in Sweden because they certainly have not been in most other areas of the globe. In fact the biggest problem many people have with the 1080 and 1070 is the high price bar set by the Founders Edition and to make matters worse, vendors were taking advantage of the short supply and charging even more.