Hbm2 Used For Anisotropic Filtering

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170420132331.htm

AMD originally developed the HBM standard specifically with video gaming and server technology in mind but, apparently, this scientist is impatient for the video game developers to show the world how to use the technology. However, his work provides an example of what we can expect in the near future. These are memory chips that are stacked right on top of one another, but can have logic chips inserted in between them and use a controller chip on the bottom of the stack to shuttle data back and forth to the cpu and gpu in large batches with the largest number of chips being stacked today being around 74, but these stacks merely contain batches of 8 at most. Still, at one gigabyte per chip and growing that's plenty for most gaming needs and the first graphics cards coming out with the technology will have up to 16gb of this memory which can be considered the equivalent of two or three times that in Vram thanks to the use of the high bandwidth controller and FPGA circuitry.

Every computer, display, radio, thermostat, or whatever can be thought of as striking a balance between what is cheap and easy to produce and what does the job people want done and are willing to pay for. A lot of graphics effects, such as anti-aliasing, would not even be necessary if we all had 8k displays and more powerful computers. Until we do get them, we're stuck with fake-it-til-you-make-it technology and it looks like stacking memory and logic chips is going to be the next big improvement we can expect for awhile. Hopefully, within the next couple of years we will see AMD and others coming out with additional improvements to the technology that allowing even more work to be done in the memory stack, but all of that has to balanced against what is cheaper, faster, and easier to do on the cpu and gpu.

Improvements like an automatic 65% faster rendering speeds are a huge improvement and give some idea of the kind of dramatic leaps we can expect to see by the end of the year. AMD is preparing to release their new Vega gpu, while the latest rumors say Nvidia may release their own Volta at the end of this year instead of next. At any rate, by early next year at the latest we should see the prices drop dramatically and, sometime within the next few years a completely new standardized computer architecture should emerge driving prices even lower.