There are major changes coming in the memory interface world, and recent interest in AMD and Nvidia’s plans to adopt the new High Memory Bandwidth standard make this a good time to explain the three new standards: Wide I/O, HBM, and HMC. Let’s kick things off with a basic question — why do we need new memory standards in the first place?
DDR4 and LPDDR4 are both incremental, evolutionary improvements to existing DRAM designs. As we’ll explore in this story, both standards improve power consumption and performance relative to DDR3/LPDDR3, but they’re not a huge leap forward. Many of the underlying technologies baked into the standard were set a decade or more ago, when total system bandwidth was a fraction of current levels and CPUs were all single-core.
DDR4 and LPDDR4 are both incremental, evolutionary improvements to existing DRAM designs. As we’ll explore in this story, both standards improve power consumption and performance relative to DDR3/LPDDR3, but they’re not a huge leap forward. Many of the underlying technologies baked into the standard were set a decade or more ago, when total system bandwidth was a fraction of current levels and CPUs were all single-core.
Full article:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/197720-beyond-ddr4-understand-the-differences-between-wide-io-hbm-and-hybrid-memory-cube
