When I asked Macri about this issue, he expressed confidence in AMD's ability to work around this capacity constraint. In fact, he said that current GPUs aren't terribly efficient with their memory capacity simply because GDDR5's architecture required ever-larger memory capacities in order to extract more bandwidth. As a result, AMD "never bothered to put a single engineer on using frame buffer memory better," because memory capacities kept growing. Essentially, that capacity was free, while engineers were not. Macri classified the utilization of memory capacity in current Radeon operation as "exceedingly poor" and said the "amount of data that gets touched sitting in there is embarrassing."
Strong words, indeed.
With HBM, he said, "we threw a couple of engineers at that problem," which will be addressed solely via the operating system and Radeon driver software. "We're not asking anybody to change their games."
