JEDEC launches next generation HBM for AMD Polaris and Nvidia Pascal

AMD’s Fiji graphics circuit used for the Radeon R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, R9 Nano and future Gemini is the world’s first, and so far only, with the HBM memory standard. The technology offers many advantages over otherwise standard GDDR5, with the disadvantage that the capacity is limited to 1 GB per capsule for a total of 4 GB per graphics card.

JEDEC is now updating the standard for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with support for much larger capacities. In addition to the current 1 GB per capsule, 2, 4 and 8 GB are now also possible, of which the latter capacity would give the Fiji graphics circuit no less than 32 GB of video memory.

The higher capacity is made possible in two ways. One is that the maximum number of storage circuits per capsule goes up from the previous 4 to 8. The other is that the density of the memory circuits that make up a capsule can be 1 GB instead of the current 256 MB.

The other news is that the speeds are doubled compared to today’s HBM memory. The clock frequency for the new generation is 1,000 MHz (2,000 MHz efficient), which with the bus width 1,024 bits gives a bandwidth of 256 GB / s. Assuming the circuit has a 4,096-bit memory bus, like Fiji, it provides a full bandwidth of 1,024 GB / s or 1 TB / s with four HBM capsules.

The new generation HBM is better known as HBM2 and is expected to find its way into the next generation of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, which will release the Polaris and Pascal architectures, respectively, during the year. The technology is also expected to be used in future processors with integrated graphics circuit (APU) from AMD.