AMD also has shared more information about the choice for HBA graphics memory usage with it's upcoming Graphics Cards. Rumors have been on-going for a long time now.... AMD Confirms HBA High Memory Bandwith for Graphics Cards
That looks very promising. Increased x86 investments, I wonder why they would want to invest in x86-architecture instead of x64
Looking at those pictures then i'd have one slight worry about this stacked vram. Getting off future HSF's might be a total nightmare, if the Vram is actually quite a bit higher than the GPU then i can see many a broken GFX card. You might in fact just twist it off with the heatsink
Yeah, I agree, I thought something similar when I saw the diagram of the HBM stacked memory being higher than the GPU core yet being right next to it. To me this would mean that heatsinks will have to be specifically designed to sit flat on the GPU core, and then have a step down to allow the HBM to fit. I think this would be a difficult design to manufacture accurately, and I think we will see inefficiencies with cooling due to heatsinks not mating to the surfaces properly, as well as the increased likelihood of damage being caused to the structure of the HBM when the heatsink is being placed & also when removed. On a side note with HBM, it's just allowing larger bandwidths and throughputs, but AMD will need to manufacture an efficient core in order to take advantage of that extra bandwidth otherwise it's pointless.
What percentage of the cards power usage comes from memory vs. the GPU in, say, the 290? Will this shave a few watts or more than that? I wonder how many layers they will have stacked, too. And are the memory and GPU cores fabricated at the process size. I'm assuming the RAM is fabricated elsewhere then fused with the GPU die, or else AMD is also getting into memory fabrication...
If I recall correctly, it will have 4 layers at the start, but can go up to 8 layers with HBM gen 1. Might change later. Also, I wonder when they will start to think of putting two or more of those blocks onto a PCB
x86 is x64. x86-32 is what is referred to when people say 32bit x86-64 is what is referred to when people say x64
