AMD Greenland GPU Features HBM2 ,14nm Coming in 2016 – R 400 Series Arctic Islands Graphics Architecture

AMD is reportedly preparing a new family of graphics cards for introduction in 2016 based on the Arctic Islands GPU architecture. The new graphics family will allegedly be manufactured at Globalfoundries on the 14nm FinFET process node and make use of the second generation of the stacked graphics memory spec by JEDEC dubbed HBM.
We’ve talked about the Arctic Islands architecture before. AMD has revealed that it will announce a number of its future roadmap at the Financial Analyst Day in May.  So it’s possible that AMD will publicly talk about this new architecture at the event.
The Arctic Islands flagship is code named Greenland and will succeed Fiji as AMD’s most powerful GPU.
Details about the new architecture are still scarce but what Fudzilla states is that with this architecture AMD will focus on significantly improving power efficiency.

AMD Greenland New R9 400 Series Flagship Coming in 2016.

The new Greenland chip will be AMD’s first GPU to be built on the 14nm process according to the report. What’s more interesting is that it seems by 2016 Gloablfoundries will become AMD’s chief GPU supplier. A role that’s been occupied by TSMC for the past two decades. TSMC’s numerous and major setbacks with 16nm quite possibly have had a hand in this.

Nvidia too it seems is interested in Samsung’s/Globalfoundries’ 14nm process node and might even favor it over TSMC’s 16nm FinFET+ for its upcoming Pascal GPUs. We know that Samsung will be making 14nm chips for Nvidia but it’s still not clear whether those will just be the company’s low power Tegra chips or if they’ll also include large, high performance GPUs.

Apart from 14nm, the Arctic Islands R 400 series family of GPUs will also feature the second generation of HBM. And will compete with Nvidia’s upcoming family of Pascal based GPUs in 2016. AMD is already set to debut the first generation of the memory technology with the Fiji GPU that’s coming this summer. So the move towards the second generation of the memory technology will be more transitional.

Nvidia revealed that the new Pascal series will make use of the second generation of the stacked memory standard in 2016 as well. So it will be the first GPU architecture from the company to use stacked memory. Nvidia on the other hand announced no plans to use the first generation of HBM in 2015. So HBM2 is quite clearly set to completely replace GDDR5 as the standard graphics memory for both AMD and Nvidia in 2016.

WCCFTech	Year	Process	Flagship GPU	Product	Memory	Bandwidth
Southern Islands	2012	28nm	Tahiti	HD 7970	3GB GDDR5	264GB/s
Volcanic Islands	2013	28nm	Hawaii	R9 290X	4GB GDDR5	320GB/s
Pirate/Caribbean Islands	2015	28nm	Fiji	R9 390X	8GB HBM1	640GB/s
Arctic Islands	2016	14nm	Greenland	R9 490X	16GB HBM2	1TB/s