HD 7000 GPUs to have XDR2 memory?

There was speculation a while back about AMD using XDR2 memory in their GPUs but this faded away and was deemed to be untrue as AMD refused to confirm or reject it while Nvidia stepped up GDDR5 for its Kepler 28nm GPUs. Now it seems AMD may be using XDR2 memory after all which has higher bandwidth than GDDR5 as well as lower power consumption. However, AMD will only be equipping this more expensive memory to the high end HD 7000 models which it will allow to support both GDDR5 and XDR2 at the same time simply by adding a controller to the PCB which allows for the simple switching mechanism.

The “cost effective” or low to mid range GPUs will be utilizing GDDR5 memory only to save on the production costs. This all comes in the light of speculation AMD and Rambus (the memory patent troll) have settled past disagreements and Rambus is willing to let AMD use its XDR2. Although it is seen by many as a necessary move in order to recover Rambus’ share prices after a failed court case against Micron and Hynix which cost them dearly.

TechPowerUp also suggests according to its sources AMD will launch in a “top to bottom” fashion starting off with the highest end dual GPU card and then release the other single GPU cards after. This means that AMD could launch the dual-GPU “New Zealand” graphics card first.

Source: My Drivers, TechPowerUp