Samsung Flashbolt HBM2 Is 33 Percent Faster, Doubles Capacity

Samsung has announced its latest version of HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory) with a sharp increase in capacity and overall performance. It’s likely a response to the advent of GDDR6, at least in part — the gap between the two memory standards has shrunk significantly.

“Flashbolt’s industry-leading performance will enable enhanced solutions for next-generation data centers, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and graphics applications,” said Jinman Han, senior vice president of Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to expand our premium DRAM offering, and improve our ‘high-performance, high capacity, and low power’ memory segment to meet market demand.”

Should We Ever Expect to See HBM in Mainstream Cards?

Up until now, HBM has been confined to the upper end of the PC market. In theory, it could come farther down the stack with 7nm, but I don’t think we’re going to see HBM in mainstream consumer cards in the 7nm generation. HBM-based cards are trickier to manufacture because routing thousands of wires through multiple layers of DRAM is a non-trivial process. Even AMD always acknowledged that HBM only gave them an economic and power consumption boost at a specific point in their own board stack. Below a certain RAM loadout and TDP, GDDR5 made more sense, even for Team Red.

With GDDR6 having replaced GDDR5, I suspect HBM will be confined back to the very top of the market — and that AMD may have opted to use it as a method of differentiating its 7nm professional and consumer product lines, much like Nvidia has. I say “may have” because those strategy decisions have already been made, even if we don’t know what they are yet.

Samsung is unlikely to have any problems either way. HBM2 has been of great interest to AI and ML companies as an alternative, high-bandwidth memory architecture for emerging compute applications. Regardless of what happens with GPUs, the memory standard should have a bright future ahead of it.

Continue reading

Apple’s New M1 SoC Looks Great, Is Not Faster Than 98 Percent of PC Laptops

Apple's new M1 silicon really looks amazing, but it isn't faster than 98 percent of the PCs sold last year, despite what the company claims.

What Does It Mean for the PC Market If Apple Makes the Fastest CPU?

Apple's M1 SoC could have a profound impact on the PC market. After 25 years, x86 may no longer be the highest-performing CPU architecture you can practically buy.

Which Is Faster, the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5? Early Data Says It’s Complicated

Competitive head-to-head data on the Xbox Series X versus the PlayStation 5 is beginning to trickle out.

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks Show Even the Fastest GPU in the World Can’t Play at 4K

It was probably impossible for Cyberpunk 2077 to live up to the hype after eight years in development, but the performance issues aren't helping.