The newest rumors I'm aware of (from around GDC) suggest Nvidia will realease the samller GP104 with GDDR5/GDDR5X to consumers before the bigger GP100 with HBM2. This sounds reasonable since Sk Hynx (which developed HBM together with AMD) will only start mass production in Q2/Q3 of 2016 - but maybe Nvidia has more luck with Samsung. Do you know of newer rumors? Maybe we know more after GTCs opening keynote from Nvidias CEO. [1]
> Anyhow atm HBM doesn't seem to offer much other than increase the cost and thermal envelope of the package.
Yeah, and HBM allows for much smaller high end gpus (like AMD Nano) and is much more power efficient, which means AMD and Nvidia could use the energy savings to clock the cards higher (but I have my doubts, AMDs Fury had not the best clocks, and overclocking was bad compared to cards with gddr).
> Nvidia for 3 generations now have been continuously shipping cards with lower memory bandwidth (with heavy focus on compression) than AMD even without HBM and continuously not only remaining competitive but managing in most cases to be the top performer.
That's why I'm looking forward to DirectX12 and Vulkan. AMDs drivers couldn't bring out the full power of their cards but that seems to change thanks to the new APIs if newest benchmarks are an indicator. Nvidia on the other hand doesn't gain much because their Dx11 drivers were already really good.
[1] https://mygtc.gputechconf.com/form/session-listing&do-search...