Will APUs finally take off with DDR4 ram?

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ThalesSousa

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Feb 19, 2015
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It is known that ram frequencies are really important when it comes to APUs, but even with higher frequency ram sticks they still had a moderate performance. My question is, will DDR4 ram with its higher frequencies finally make APUs viable alternatives to mid and high end graphics cards? (That is, if amd decides to work with it even more) Or do you think even with the gains from DDR4 APUs still won't be worth it?
 
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I can see RAM continuing to be made. Servers and higher end machines will still need more then 16GBs. And with requirements increasing all the time 16GBs isn't going to stay "high end" for long. But we might see a time where you buy an APU/CPU and it comes with all the ram you need. It's also another way for AMD/Intel to differentiate their "CPUs" by changing the amount of "ram" it comes with. (and a couple of slots on the motherboard to add some more in case you guessed wrong of the use of the machine changes.)

As for APUs HBM seems to be the new standard. I'd expect all cards/APUs to have it at some point.
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4745454b

Titan
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Apr 29, 2006
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Highend? No. At least for the foreseeable future you will need a GPU for that.

I did see a comment the other day about what HBM/stacked ram might end up doing. Currently the R9 Fury is limited to 4GBs of HBM. The next cards coming are supposed to come with double that, 8GBs. In twoish years it's supposed to double again. Just think about that. In 2018ish you might be able to buy an APU that has 8 cores, a "strong" IGP, and 16GBs of it's own ram on the die. As long as this can be used as system ram, you might see PCs changing yet again. No need for ram slots? Or rather the ram slots being empty because you have "enough" ram on the die itself? Interesting.
 
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ThalesSousa

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Feb 19, 2015
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Although it seems interesting, I wonder how many complications that would create. For example, how would overclocking work on processors with "dedicated memory"? What would companies that make ram do after processors gained the capacity to pack their own memory? Also, if hbm became the new standard, would normal DDR3 and 4 ram get dirt cheap? But back to the APUs, hbm would probably give them a huge performance boost, but I'm not sure if that would ever become a reality, since on the next gen GPUs only the high end models are going to use it (lower end models will have GDDR5X). But I don't know, it might become the new standard someday.
 
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4745454b

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
Apr 29, 2006
29,241
437
93,590
I can see RAM continuing to be made. Servers and higher end machines will still need more then 16GBs. And with requirements increasing all the time 16GBs isn't going to stay "high end" for long. But we might see a time where you buy an APU/CPU and it comes with all the ram you need. It's also another way for AMD/Intel to differentiate their "CPUs" by changing the amount of "ram" it comes with. (and a couple of slots on the motherboard to add some more in case you guessed wrong of the use of the machine changes.)

As for APUs HBM seems to be the new standard. I'd expect all cards/APUs to have it at some point.
 
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