An architecture preview
This is an architecture preview hence we do have a thing or two to share with you today. Let's get the elephant out of the room first and confirm something. Yes, VEGA, (well VEGA10) will be fitted with HBM2 memory as well as a new IO gateway and that cache dubbed High Bandwidth Cache. Vega is a GPU with 200 new features. A handful of things are key for AMD with this very scalable GPU new architecture. Now I deliberately state new architecture here as that much is a fact, VEGA is not based upon Polaris, this is a completely new chip and architecture with a new programmable geometry pipeline as well.
Vega 10 is using High Bandwidth Video Memory, VRAM, graphics memory or whatever you like to call it. The specific type flavor or flavah-flaf used is HBM2 memory. The graphics gawds from AMD claim that HBM2 will offer you 5x the power efficiency compared to any other graphics memory including GDDR5, and yes that is huge. Another benefit obviously is capacity. HBM is on-chip vertically stacked (slabs of memory cells placed on top of each other) and you know it, when it comes to caches and memory bigger is simply better (in terms of storage volume). With the second iteration of HBM, HBM2 AMD now has 8x the density per stack with a 50% smaller footprint. So again, not to confuse anybody, frame-buffer or graphics memory is now referred to as HB (high bandwidth) cache here. I'll let you in on a little secret (AMD has not disclosed this much), but you may can expect 8 GB for the initial VEGA based products.