Deep dive: Hynix’s High Bandwidth Memory

We’ve discussed the capabilities and performance of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) multiple times over the past six months, but a new report sheds light on the physical architecture and construction of HBM. This new memory technology is viewed as the future of GPU memory. Nvidia will debut its own Pascal architecture in 2016 with HBM2, while AMD launched its own HBM-equipped GPUs, the Radeon Fury X and Radeon Fury, earlier this summer.


The full report by Tech Insights is paywalled, but the company shared a number of slides and details with EETimes. The HBM assembly that AMD and Hynix jointly designed is genuinely new compared to other products on the market. Samsung has used TSVs (through silicon vias) for wiring DRAM together before, but no one has ever built a wide I/O design like this in a commercial product.