AMD has never been afraid to try new things, from hitting 1GHz first, to creating a true multicore processor, most recently adopting HBM and HBM2 into their graphics cards. That move contributed to some of their recent difficulties with the current generation of GPUs; HBM is more expensive to produce and more of a challenge to implement. While they were the first to implement HBM, it is NVIDIA and Intel which are benefiting from AMD's experimental nature. Their new generation of HPC solutions, the Tesla P100, Quadro GP 100 and Lake Crest all use HBM2 and benefit from the experience Hynix, Samsung and TSMC gained fabbing the first generation. Vega products offer slightly less memory bandwidth as well as lagging behind in overall performance, a drawback to being first.

On a positive note, AMD have now had more experience designing chips which make use of HBM and this could offer a new hope for the next generation of cards, both gaming and HPC flavours. DigiTimes briefly covers the two processes manufacturers use in the production of HBM here.

"However, Intel's release of its deep-learning chip, Lake Crest, which came following its acquisition of Nervana, has come with HMB2. This indicates that HBM-based architecture will be the main development direction of memory solutions for HPC solutions by GPU vendors."

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