AMD puts massive SSDs on GPUs and calls it SSG "Game changing performance"
rest below.AMD just changed the GPU game forever with their Radeon SSG technology. If you have been waiting for a GPU with massive flash storage on board, SemiAccurate has good news for you.
It is hard to overstate what a sea change AMD’s SSG technology brings, putting large low latency storage on a GPU will bring about some amazing opportunities. More importantly things that simply could not be done on a GPU before are now not only possible but practical. For the professional space in movie rendering, previsualization, and massive, complex CAD models, persistent GPU storage really does change how things will be done.
On the technical front the idea is easy enough to explain, take a couple of M.2 PCIe3 4x NVMe SSDs and slap the onto a professional GPU. Connect them with eight PCIe lanes peeled off the main bus, and off you go. Not many more technical details were given out, nor were pictures of the card or board, but that should be enough to get us started.
In short you can now have terabytes of persistent low latency storage on your GPU, with persistent, low latency, and terabytes being the game changing parts so we will repeat them, several times. Terabytes of persistent low-latency storage on your GPU, really important. The hardware is just off the shelf M.2 SSDs so the low-level wear leveling will be handled by the hardware and users will see this first generation as just storage. If AMD doesn’t implement a flat memory model in very short order in the next generation or two, we will happily eat one. HINT.
So users now have a fairly coarse block addressable space on their professional GPUs, what’s the big deal? You don’t have to traverse the system PCie bus, the driver stack, CPU, back over the bus, and to storage to get data now so the impossible is now possible. Better yet the CPU overhead of sending data to the GPU is now gone as is the bus congestion brought on by streaming large textures from plentiful system memory to precious GPU memory. This is the roundabout technical way of saying that SemiAccuate thinks those 8x PCIe lanes peeled off for the SSDs are going to be more than made up for by the system traffic they free up. Faster, less energy, and lower latency.
But what about these benefits? The first demo AMD is said to be showing is a use case for movie editing and cleanup on the GPU. What is the issue here you may ask, this is old hat and has been done on the CPU for years. Some GPUs can even assist it without slowing things down in the process, so what does SSG add? How about 8K movie streaming and cleanup in realtime. At 96FPS. Sure you can do this with traditional methods but the best of them will run the same task at 17FPS.
AMD is happy to point out this is a 5.6x speedup or so for the cost of two consumer SSDs. Before SSG, possible but slow. After SSG, fast enough for most users. The impossible, realtime 8K cleanup, is now possible. Hugely complex and highly detailed CAD models that took the better part of an hour to load up and decompress will still take the better part of an hour to load up and decompress on an SSG GPU based system. Why bother? Because it takes the better part of an hour to load and decompress the first time, then it can stay resident on the GPU’s flash storage. The second time it should take seconds. If you look at the cost of a modern automotive or aerospace engineer’s time, SSG is a no-brainer, any CTO would be foolish not to deploy this tech ASAP, the ROI would be measured in weeks.
http://semiaccurate.com/2016/07/25/a...pus-calls-ssg/
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