Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes that Nvidia has announced plans to stack up DRAM on future ‘Volta’ GPUs to deliver over 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth. Due sometime around 2016, Volta’s memory technology will bring memory closer to the GPU, increasing bandwidth while reducing latency.
Volta is going to solve one of the biggest issues with GPUs today, which is access to memory bandwidth,” explained Huang. “The memory bandwidth on a GPU is already several times that of a CPU, but we never seem to have enough.” So with Volta, Nvidia is going to get the memory closer to the GPU so signals do not have to come out of the GPU, onto a circuit board, and into the GDDR memory. This current approach takes more power (you have to pump up the signal to make it travel over the board), introduces latencies, decreases bandwidth.
In related projects, Micron, Intel, and IBM are partnering on an effort to stack up DRAM, with hopes to commercialize something in the next few years. Read the Full Story.