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AI/ML Nvidia sidesteps JEDEC HBM standard GPU king and dominant HBM buyer Nvidia has effectively sent JEDEC back to the drawing board with its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) standard. HBM is the interposer-connected stacked memory for GPUs that by-passes x86 socket-connected DRAM capacity and bandwidth limits. The Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) published its JESD235 (restricted access) first HBM standard in 2013 and Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron built compliant HBM chips bought, in the main, by Nvidia, its system-building partners, and other GPU builders. Now, 23 years later, Nvidia has revolted against HBM memory controller functionality being in its GPU chip and moved it to the HMB base die unit, freeing up space for more GPU cores. The change is in Nvidia’s NVHBM custom HBM standard, part of its August NVLInk Fusion announcement. It claims NVHBM delivers up to 30 percent greater memory bandwidth, 15 percent lower HBM power consumption, and frees up to 25 percent more area on its GPU compute die compared with standard HBM4E. A couple of Nvidia GPU chip layout images show the effect: Currently HBM has a wide physical interface with many pins connecting it via an interposer to the GPU where the HBM memory controller is located. NVHBM has a narrower and custom PHY interface with the memory controller function moved off the GPU, which means there is more space for AI-processing GPU cores as well as more HBM bandwidth. However, this is specific to Nvidia and is not an industry standard. As Nvidia is such a massive HBM buyer - according to reported Morgan Stanley data Nvidia will be responsible for purchasing 37 percent of the global HBM supply in 2027 - the three HBM suppliers are happy to play along and support Huang’s colossus. So much so that they even let Nvidia dictate the semiconductor foundry process they must use, TSMC’s 3nm. Reuters reported Samsung will accede to this request. South Korea’s Seoul Economic Daily said Samsung would however still build JEDEC standard HBM in-house for other customers Also Amazon’s Amazon’s Annapurna Labs is supporting NVHBM as an Nvidia NVlink partner. JEDEC Conundrum JEDEC has not issued any public comment about NVHBM. NVHBM is effectively an industry standard because Nvidia is such a dominant HBM buyer and there are only three HBM-manufacturing suppliers all of whom are supporting Nvidia. When JEDEC announced the HBM4 standard in April last year, the HBM subcommittee chair was Barry Wagner, Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia. His continued chairmanship might now be untenable. One JEDEC response might be to accept Nvidia’s invasion of its HBM standard setting scope and restrict its HBM specification activities to the stack above the HBM stack’s base memory controller die. Another might be to continue as before, with an absent Nvidia. A third might be to move in the NVHBM direction and add a base memory controller die with narrower and faster physical channels. This would build on reduced HBM PHY pin count work it is already doing.
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