According to the recent article HBM memory is 3x less efficient wafer area wise than LPDDR; but the bandwidth is more than triple.

What if its in everyone's interest to buy computers at say 1/3rd the rate and switch everything over to HBM?

the discrepancy between compute and memory has been growing for ages, perhaps a painful switch to HBM is exactly what we need?

Would you rather have 3 intermediate computers with low memory bandwidth, or wait a little longer statistically so that we can all enjoy a new computer at 1/3rd the rate but much higher bandwidth than the area ratio?

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FuckButtons 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

These are fundamentally different points in design space though, hbm doesn’t have a 10mw idle draw like lpddr does.

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aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can’t put HBM in smartphones and laptops. The power drain is too great.

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thfuran 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not many workloads are RAM bandwidth limited. Power and latency are much more common bottlenecks, and HBM loses on both of those.

	▲	zozbot234 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Multicore workloads do tend to hit RAM bandwidth limits before they hit power constraints. If you do the math, running at max frequency and core utilization would usually imply you could only access a byte or so per core clock cycle. Perhaps a mere handful of bytes for the highest-performance systems with in-package RAM.
	▲	pastel8739 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Isn’t memory bandwidth super relevant for AI?