The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange.

If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?

I have been wondering this recently. It was the convention that if you wanted to keep costs down, try to keep the memory bus size down as low as possible. Still remember the awful Radeon 9200 SE - 64bit data bus that strangled an already slow GPU.

Heck, I have a phone with a 16bit memory bus for instance. The high(ish) clock rate only makes up the difference slightly.

But with general prices on all components going up, it might not be such a big factor any more.

HBM migght make sense for higher end products which can free up space for the lower end that will never use the tech.

> 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today

5090 has 1.8 TB/s?

I was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.

That card only had 16GB of memory; its memory bandwidth was 1TB/s.