# AMD sheds light on High Bandwidth Memory in new Radeons, pokes Nvidia



## TechSocial (Dec 20, 2011)

More than seven years in the making, AMD on Tuesday unveiled what it believes will be a game-changing technology: a superfast, stacked chip technology called High Bandwidth Memory. Even better, the company crowed: Nvidia is at least a year behind it.

Using stacked RAM chips that communicate through tiny holes, High Bandwidth Memory offers three times the performance of traditional GDDR5 thats used by GPUs today and drastically reduces power consumption too, said AMD Chief Technology Officer Joe Macri, who oversaw HBMs development.

Why this matters: A graphics cards memory bandwidth matters as much to game performance as the graphics processor. An increase in memory bandwidth almost always means more performance, too, when coupled with changes to the GPU.
The Problem

Modern graphics cards drink memory bandwidth like a big-block V8 drinks gas. The problem is the current memory, GDDR5, is rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns, Macri said. To add more memory bandwidth using GDDR5 would consume too much power to be an effective performance boost.

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