• crazyates88@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    And mining. Ethereum mining is very memory intensive, so they had to limit memory bandwidth and find other ways to make up the performance for games. That’s why you don’t see 384 or 512-but memory bus anymore, they’re all as low low low as you can go. A 128-bit bus isn’t uncommon, sadly.

    • einmaldrin_alleshin@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      The reason for the shrinking memory buses is the bad scaling of IO with newer processes. The memory controllers on AD102 have basically the same footprint as that on GA102, in spite of there being a gigantic increase in overall transistor density

      Ethereum mining hasn’t been a thing for a year now btw

    • Zednot123@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      That’s why you don’t see 384

      2080 Ti, 3090, 4090.

      or 512-but memory bus anymore

      We haven’t seen them since we moved to GDDR6. Simply because the signal integrity and power requirements makes it quite unreasonable.

      find other ways to make up the performance for games

      Lack of DRAM scaling is the reason why we are where we are. Computational power has grown much faster than bandwidth.

      Nvidia has had around a generation of advantage in bandwidth efficiency/utilization since Maxwell over AMD. Surprise surprise, one generation after AMD they as well have to resort to larger caches to substitute for bandwidth.

      A 512 bit G6 bus (which isn’t realistic to begin with), would not have given 4090 enough bandwidth over 3090. To keep up with the growth in computational power.