AMD’s Financial Analyst Day (or FAD) is an event hosted by AMD and purposed around convincing investors to stick with AMD. They do so by demonstrating up-to-date roadmaps, break down numbers and unveil new plans for the future. We’re just here for the GPUs.
We have good news on that front actually. AMD’s “Corporate Strategy and Long-Term Plan” involves a slew of new graphics technologies as well as releases over the coming years, and what they’ve promised sounds great.
AMD’s looking to return to a stable and ever-increasing profitability. Part of their plan is a lot of rad graphics tech.
During their “Computing and Graphics Segment Overview“, CEO Dr. Lisa Su discussed upcoming graphics technologies for AMD, including their next line of discreet/desktop GPUs.
Dr. Su has confirmed that their forthcoming range of, yet to be officially named, GPUs will launch this quarter – sporting new high bandwidth memory (HBM) to boot. They will also be fully DirectX 12 compliant and more than likely support AMD’s newest “lossless delta color compression” tech, or at least that’s what Anandtech (who attended FAD) theorises – we can’t imagine them not.
*AMD’s forthcoming line of desktop GPUs are often referred to as Fiji or the AMD Radeon RX 300 series.*
NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 GPU’s aren’t to be trifled with, but AMD is certainly going to try.
For those who don’t know, HBM is the next step in high-performance RAM. Designed specifically for graphics architecture, HBM is a specialized application of Wide I/O 2 that allows for higher bandwidth than GDDR5, but with a lower power demand. According to Anandtech, we’re talking 3x the memory performance-per-watt. It’s essentially achieved by stacking multiple memory chips together and on top of or as close to the processor as possible (a process called 3D packaging). They’re all interconnected, which allows for 1024-bit interface, and being so close to one another means blisteringly fast bandwidth as a result.
HBM should mean the bandwidth to handle 4K resolutions with far less strain on your PC than even NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 GPUs can accommodate. It also means applying techniques like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering to 4K images. Jaggies will be a thing of the past. Virtual reality performance should also be greatly improved as a result. Best of all, HBM means smaller, less power hungry, cooler and quieter GPUs.
HBM alongside “lossless delta color compression” should translate into serious bandwidth gains for AMD’s newest GPUs
We can’t wait to see what one of these babies can do. Pair it with Intel’s upcoming Skylake-S CPUs and you should have a real beastly rig on your hands.
