At GTC 2018, we learned that SK Hynix’s GDDR6 memory is bound for mass production in 3 months, and will be featured on several upcoming nVidia products. Some of these include autonomous vehicle components, but we also learned that we should expect GDDR6 on most, if not all, of nVidia’s upcoming gaming architecture cards.

Given a mass production timeline of June-July for GDDR6 from SK Hynix, assuming Hynix is a launch-day memory provider, we can expect next-generation GPUs to become available after this timeframe. There still needs to be enough time to mount the memory to the boards, after all. We don’t have a hard date for when the next-generation GPU lineup will ship, but from this information, we can assume it’s at least 3 months away -- possibly more. Basically, what we know is that, assuming Hynix is a launch vendor, new GPUs are nebulously >3 months away.

This week's hardware news recap teases some of our upcoming content pieces, including a potential test on Dragonball FighterZ, along with pending-publication interviews of key Spectre & Meltdown researchers. In addition to that, as usual, we discuss major hardware news for the past few days. The headline item is the most notable, and pertains to Samsung's GDDR6 memory entering mass production, nearing readiness for deployment in future products. This will almost certainly include GPU products, alongside the expected mobile device deployments. We also talk AMD's new-hires and RTG restructure, its retiring of the implicit primitive discard accelerator for Vega, and SilverStone's new low-profile air cooler.

Show notes are below the embedded video.

This week’s hardware news recap primarily focuses on Intel’s Minix implementation, alongside creator Andrew Tanenbaum’s thoughts on the unknown adoption of the OS, along with some new information on the AMD + Intel multi-chip module (MCM) that’s coming to market. Supporting news items for the week include some GN-style commentary of a new “gaming” chair with case fans in it, updates on nVidia quarterly earnings, Corsair’s new “fastest” memory, and EK’s 560mm radiators.

Find the show notes after the embedded video.

In additional hardware news to what we published yesterday -- a look at Intel's Kaby Lake (7600K, 7700K, etc.), the X2 Empire unique enclosure, and Logitech's G Pro mouse -- we are today visiting topics of Samsung's GDDR6, SK Hynix's HBM3 R&D, PCIe Gen4 power budget, and Zen's CCX architecture.

The biggest news here is Samsung's GDDR6, due for 2018, but it's all important stuff. PCI-e Gen4 is looking at being fully ratified EOY 2016, HBM3 is in R&D, and Zen is imminent and finalized architecturally. We'll talk about it more specifically in our reviews.

Update: Tom's misreported on PCI-e power draw. The Gen4 PCIe interface will still be 75W.

Anyway, here's the news recap:

Transcript

Memory manufacturer Samsung is developing GDDR6 as a successor to Micron's brand new GDDR5X, presently only found in the GTX 1080 and Titan XP cards. GDDR6 may feel like a more meaningful successor to GDDR5, though, which has been in production use since 2008.

In its present, fully matured form, GDDR5 operates at 8Gbps maximally, including on the RX 480 and GTX 10 series GPUs. Micron demonstrated GDDR5X as capable of approaching 12-13Gbps with proper time to mature the architecture, but is presently shipping the memory in 10Gbps speeds for the nVidia devices.

Samsung indicates an operating range of approximately 14Gbps to 16Gbps on GDDR6 at 1.35V, coupled with lower voltages than even GDDR5X by using LP4X. Samsung indicates a power reduction upwards of 20% with post-LP4 memory technology.

Samsung is looking toward 2018 for production of GDDR6, giving GDDR5X some breathing room yet. As for HBM, SK Hynix is already looking toward HBM3, with HBM2 only presently available in the GP100 Accelerator cards. HBM3 will theoretically run a 4096-bit interface with upwards of 2TB/s throughput, at 512GB/s per stack. We'll talk about this tech more in the semi-distant future.

PCIe

Tom's Hardware this week reported on the new PCI Express 4.0 specification, primarily detailing a push toward a minimum spec of 300W power transfer through the slot, but could be upwards of 500W. Without even talking about the bandwidth promises – moving to nearly 2GB/s for a single lane – the increase of power budget will mean that the industry could begin a shift away from PCI-e cables. The power would obviously still come form the power supply, but would be delivered through pins in the PCI-e slots rather than through an extra cable.

This same setup is what allows cards like a 750 Ti to function only off the PCI-e slot, because the existing spec allows for 75W to push through the PCIe bus. PCI-e 4.0 should be ratified by the end of 2016 by the PCI-SIG team, but we don't yet know the roll-out plans for consumer platforms.

Zen

AMD also detailed more of its Zen CPU architecture, something we talked about last week when the company camped out near IDF for an unveil event. The Summit Ridge chips have primarily been on display thus far, showing an 8C/16T demo with AMD's implementation of SMT, but we haven't heard much about other processors.

AMD is ditching modules in favor of CPU Complexes, or a CCX, each of which will host four CPU cores. Each CCX runs 512KB of L2 Cache per core, as seen in this block diagram, with L3 sliced into four pieces for 8MB total low-order address interleave cache. AMD says that each core can communicate with all cache on the CCX, and promises the same latency for all accesses.

It looks like the lowest SKU chips will still be quad-cores at a minimum.

Host: Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke
Video: Andrew "ColossalCake" Coleman