Production will start in Q1 2016 following the pilot production and reliability tests expected to complete later this year.

AMD secured priority access to SK Hynix's HBM2 chip output which left Nvidia high and dry AMD was expected to strive to capture as much of the initial production capacity as possible.

While there is still no clear roadmap from AMD indicating what it plans to do with the second generation of this high bandwidth memory, it looks like Nvidia has managed to sort out its supply issues read for release.

In addition to the HBM2 bandwidth boost, Nvidia says it will enhance the performance of Pascal GPUs with NVLink. This interconnect technology is said to allow data sharing "at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe Gen3 interconnect".

The first shipments of HBM2 are said to be destined for use with GPUs, like Pascal, and also for servers, supercomputers, networks, and high-performance PCs. It is expected that HBM equipped graphics cards will be 'mainstream' by 2018.