digitimesAMD expected to unveil Polaris GPU in June

[Glo.]

You got that part wrong. Apple wanted A9 to be Glofo/Samsung. Ended up being Samsung/TSMC and A9X is TSMC exclusive. A10 is TSMC exclusive.

Apple wanted to get the highest possible performance for their A9X, and it was not achievable on 14 nm LPE process. So they went with TSMC. Why dual source then the A9? Because they had to buy volume from TSMC, and A9X alone was not enough.

 

[happy medium]

I highly doubt either camp will be using GDDR5X on Polaris/Pascal chips. GDDR5X is going to be much more expensive, and not available in the quantities that either want. AMD has pretty much stated they will not use GDDR5X because of cost. Polaris is GDDR5, and Vega is HBM2.

I would expect big Pascal (out next year sometime) to use HBM2. While the first round of Pascal coming late this year is GDDR5 (not X).

quote:
If you’ve been paying close attention to the industry you will quickly point out that this makes sense in so many ways. Firstly there’s the cost advantage of using GDDR5/X over HBM. GDDR5/X chips area cheaper to make because they don’t have to go through a meticulous process to stack them on top of each other. As a GPU maker you also don’t need an interposer with GDDR5/X like you do with HBM. Both of these factors give GDDR5/X a very real cost advantage. Secondly there’s the question of HBM2’s readiness. HBM is still ramping and it would take sometime to for HBM2 to catch up

Read more: http://wccftech.com/amds-greenland-vega-10-flagship-gpu-hbm2-launching-2017/#ixzz435ImiGTT