[HN Gopher] Micron Kicks Off Production of HBM3E Memory
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       Micron Kicks Off Production of HBM3E Memory
        
       Author : 0xd1r
       Score  : 93 points
       Date   : 2024-02-27 10:37 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
        
       | brucethemoose2 wrote:
       | How about higher capacity GDDR6X?
       | 
       | 48GB consumer cards (or 96GB pro cards) would sell like hotcakes
       | if AMD/Intel dare to break the artificial VRAM segmentation
       | status quo.
        
         | teaearlgraycold wrote:
         | Build it and people will start porting their CUDA stuff to run
         | on other architectures.
        
         | Brananarchy wrote:
         | You over estimate the 'semi-pro' market for graphics cards.
         | Gamers are barely willing to pay for 20GB. There's no market
         | for consumer cards with an order of magnitude more RAM until
         | games are built to use that memory.
        
           | cinntaile wrote:
           | 48GB cards would sell like hotcakes. The problem is that they
           | would sell way less cards aimed at professionals, where they
           | have much higher margins.
        
             | AnthonyMouse wrote:
             | Intel doesn't sell a lot of graphics cards whatsoever
             | though. Be the first to offer 64GB of VRAM for under $1000
             | and that could change pretty fast.
        
               | xadhominemx wrote:
               | Not without CUDA unfortunately.
        
               | KeplerBoy wrote:
               | Don't underestimate the amount of shit people would be
               | willing to deal with to make stuff work.
               | 
               | A capable GPU with 24+ GB would sell if it significantly
               | undercuts Nvidia. Just look at geohot building his
               | tinyboxes with AMD cards.
        
               | xadhominemx wrote:
               | I would personally love that project but there are
               | already so many versioning issues in the space it would
               | be a nightmare if ROCm randomly broke things all the
               | time.
        
               | KeplerBoy wrote:
               | I agree, ROCm seems to be a mess from the outside, but
               | I'm glad people are putting in the effort.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | And we're talking about Intel here. AMD is going to price
               | competitively against Nvidia but they'd still rather you
               | buy a $20,000 MI300 than a hypothetical 128GB Radeon for
               | $2000.
               | 
               | Intel could very easily just put a buttload of VRAM on
               | their existing GPUs to stick it to their competitors and
               | make out like bandits. All they'd have to do is charge a
               | Big markup instead of an Enterprise markup. And Intel has
               | a better history of not making broken libraries.
        
           | ianbutler wrote:
           | This is for ML, not gamers. There is an entirely different
           | market here.
        
             | usrusr wrote:
             | But "basement ML" is a thing, the market of people who are
             | interested in PC gaming but not to the point of being
             | lifestyle gamers who throw every cent they can spare at
             | that altar. The GPU they bought long before the pandemic is
             | still running every game they throw at it, but they never
             | completely stop eyeing the new stuff. Dipping their toes in
             | ML, even if it's just getting through 80% of some stable
             | diffusion setup tutorial, can be a very welcome excuse to
             | upgrade their gaming. A card sold for gaming but with
             | generously overprovisioned VRAM (ideally in the range of
             | the lowest bin of the biggest or second-biggest chip I
             | think) could match that market segment very well - and it
             | would not only compete with other price points, it would
             | actually increase the market by some buyers (those who
             | would not upgrade without the "ML excuse").
        
         | HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
         | I swear I'm getting Deja Vu right now, I coulda sworn I've seen
         | this thread before. There's gonna be a guy commenting that "you
         | don't need it" somebody else saying "but I want it!" And a few
         | trying to figure out the economics of it and whether or not it
         | makes any sense.
         | 
         | Personally I'd love to have as much VRAM as possible (and as
         | high a bandwidth as is possible too) to mess around with
         | simulations in- but that's _definitely_ a pro workload.
         | 
         | I'd love to see like a flagship card have a stupid amounts of
         | VRAM spec option - like an RTX 4090 with 32-48gb of VRAM just
         | to see what happens with it on the market.
        
           | omneity wrote:
           | A friend just got an M3 Max with 128GB (V)RAM and he's
           | extremely happy with it (AI workloads wise). That could be an
           | option if you can run your simulations on macOS.
        
             | AnthonyMouse wrote:
             | That machine with 128GB is $5000, with 48GB is still well
             | over $3000, and has as much memory bandwidth as a $400 GPU.
             | At the current spot price, 128GB of GDDR6 is <$400 and 48GB
             | is <$150, implying that they could be paired with any
             | existing <$1000 GPU to produce something significantly
             | faster for dramatically less money. If anyone could be
             | bothered to make one.
        
               | omneity wrote:
               | I agree with you, that's how it should be, but that's not
               | how it currently is.
               | 
               | Looking at what's available right now. You need 3 A100
               | 40GB to get this amount of VRAM which will cost you way
               | north of 20000$.
               | 
               | Doing it with A6000s is still about 15k$.
               | 
               | There's not that many high VRAM options out there you
               | know..
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | If all you want is VRAM you can get old P40s with 24GB
               | for $175 and it's 144GB for $1050. Then you need a big
               | machine to put six of them in but that doesn't cost
               | $4000.
               | 
               | But all of this is kludges. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX has
               | more than twice the memory bandwidth of the M3 Max with
               | much better performance per watt than an array of P40s.
               | What you want is that with more VRAM, not any of this
               | misery.
        
               | omneity wrote:
               | That checks out in principle, but given that P40 doesn't
               | support NVLink, I wouldn't count too much on using six of
               | them together in a performant manner.
               | 
               | But yeah the best option remains an MI300 if you can
               | afford that.
        
               | a_wild_dandan wrote:
               | Yeah, my M2 MacBook has 96GB @400GB/s. For $4k or so, it
               | feels like cheating. Does it beat 4x24GB NVIDIA cards?
               | Absolutely not! It's slower and occasionally runs into
               | CUDA-moat software issues. But the capability to daily
               | drive Mixtral 8x7 locally, with great token speeds, is
               | _phenomenal_.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | NVLink is most needed for training. For inference a lot
               | of the popular models can usefully be run on multiple
               | GPUs without it:
               | 
               | https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/142rm0m/llam
               | acp...
        
         | hydroreadsstuff wrote:
         | https://semiconductor.samsung.com/news-events/tech-blog/a-br...
        
         | hkgirjenk wrote:
         | Don't you think Nvidia analyzed, sliced and diced the market to
         | figure out how to maximize profits?
         | 
         | AMD is doing the same thing, the only high memory cards they
         | put out (MI300) are for data centers.
        
           | andy_ppp wrote:
           | It's possible to come up with many strategies and different
           | companies will. Why are you so sure that Nvidia's strategy is
           | right for AMD or Intel who need to offer differentiation to
           | get over the CUDA moat?
        
           | xadhominemx wrote:
           | NVIDIA has actually not really sliced and diced the market.
           | They only sell Cadillacs, which is fine for now because
           | they're the only game in town.
        
       | hmottestad wrote:
       | And Samsung just launched 36 GB packages of HBM3E:
       | https://www.anandtech.com/show/21278/samsung-launches-12hi-3...
       | 
       | Combined with this[1] interesting paper from summer 2023 on HBM
       | combined with Xeon processors which would now allow for 144 GB on
       | a single CPU. In theory at least.
       | 
       | 1: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1738-implementing-intel-
       | hig...
        
         | hiddencost wrote:
         | > launched
         | 
         | Not true. They announced completion of development, with
         | intention to begin mass production in H1. So a couple months
         | out, at least.
         | 
         | > Micron's memory roadmap for AI is further solidified with the
         | upcoming release of a 36 GB 12-Hi HBM3E product in March 2024.
         | 
         | So likely competitive timing with Samsung for 36/12.
        
           | hmottestad wrote:
           | Went by the title, but yeah, announced is more fitting.
        
       | omneity wrote:
       | Would this explain why I started seeing so many ads from HBM
       | manufacturers with no product an individual like me can purchase?
       | (I'm not even close to hardware, professionally)
       | 
       | Not naming the company but seems like HBM manufacturers might be
       | going all-in to benefit from Nvidia's stock surge.
        
       | fcanesin wrote:
       | By the article (March production) new GPU eng. samples should be
       | flying in H1 which means new high memory GPUs coming end of the
       | year. 2025 will be extremely exciting for ML.
        
       | spintin wrote:
       | This is an empty article:
       | 
       | - CAS latency?
       | 
       | - Wattage?
       | 
       | Also: https://piped.video/watch?v=2G4_RZo41Zw (is this memory
       | same size as 5nm?)
        
       | jdblair wrote:
       | The linked press release is a better source, anandtech didn't add
       | much.
       | 
       | https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
        
       | mechagodzilla wrote:
       | What is the read latency like on HBM3E?
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-28 23:02 UTC)