SK Hynix will ship HBM2 by the third quarter of this year

SK Hynix has reportedly revealed in its product catalog that it will begin shipping HBM2 memory by the third quarter of 2016. The company will ship 4GB HBM2 stacks in the 4-high stack form factor, which could allow cards with up to a 4,096-bit memory bus width and 16GB of memory to be built.

In comparison, SK Hynix’s first generation HBM comprised just 1GB per stack, for a total of 4GB on four stacks.

While SK Hynix was the first to manufacture first-generation HBM in the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, it has since lagged behind in bringing second-generation HBM (or HBM2) to the market. For instance, Samsung beat it to the punch when it began mass production of HBM2 earlier this year.

HBM2 from SK Hynix will be available in two variants which run at different speeds – one reportedly runs at 2.0Gbps, while the other runs at 1.6Gbps.

There’s no news on when SK Hynix will begin making 8GB HBM2 stacks, but Samsung has already announced plans to do so by the year’s end.

Finally, this new development might signal that AMD’s next-generation Vega GPUs are a step closer to being realized. Vega isn’t expected to be released until 2017, but AMD has already confirmed that it will use HBM2. Just last month, Senior VP and Chief Architect of the Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri tweeted a picture of a celebration in Shanghai to hail the completion of an unnamed milestone in Vega's development.

Source: TechPowerUp

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