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bob1029 3 hours ago

It's not that there's a blocker. It's that it takes roughly 3x the manufacturing capacity to produce an HBM package at the same storage capacity as DRAM. We are sacrificing total bytes for bandwidth.

rkagerer an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I don't fully understand the source of the "total bytes" constraint, but a major factor may be because HBM4 / HBM4E can only make use of the footprint directly above the processor/logic die (or in direct vicinity of its interconnect), while traditional DRAM can be placed further away where there's lots of real estate on the motherboard.

I gather a practical max ceiling today is a stack of 16 chips in height yielding 64GB?

These chips have a massive bus size of 2048 bits, instead of the 64 or 128 bits (dual channel) used by DDR5. That's what gives them their order-of-magnitude bandwidth speedup. But even though they technically pack in more capacity per square millimeter of motherboard, I gather they take up more space than older technologies once you account for the vias and interconnects to route all those signals.

threecheese an hour ago | parent [-]

Thanks for that, just went down an interesting rabbit hole. Many of us were hoping this re-tooling would eventually trickle some fast RAM down to DRAM-exhausted PCs, but given it would require a rearchitecture of the motherboard it's unlikely.

tliltocatl 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How so? FEOL is pretty much the same, BEOL is almost the same save TSVs, the packaging tech is different and more advanced, but not exactly 1:1 comparable. Do TSVs really occupy 3x the area of DDR IO's?

Const-me 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

See remark on the slide 11: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec... That presentation is by Micron.

Karliss 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't really say that it needs to use 3x more area, but that 3x more gets consumed due to "advanced packaging and manfuacturing complexity". Which doesn't properly explain why it consumes 3x more and could simply mean they have a bad yield and 2/3 produced is garbage.

bob1029 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 2/3 produced is garbage.

This might not be far off the mark. You are irreversibly linking the fates of these devices after a certain stage of manufacturing. If something goes wrong at final packaging time, you lose all dies instead of one.

tliltocatl 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea, that's the question. Yield situation can improve. Area overhead would not improve short of a completely new and incompatible tech.

skavi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

direct link: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec...

tliltocatl 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yuck. Time to build an xSPI/HyperRAM workstation (if only these had multi-bank chips).

buildbot 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sadly the $ per byte of xSPI and HyperRAM quite high

tliltocatl 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but enough to run a text editor, or even a mechanical CAD. Not an LLM, but that's the point!

monster_truck 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

3x is a reasonable figure. They are not literally that large, though.