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AMD has put an SSD on a graphics card
- phamilton 10y agoI used to do research on gene sequencing on a GPU. For small sets it was quite fast (it's arguably a O(n^4) algorithm, though really a O(n^2m^2)) but once you couldn't fit the data set on the GPU it was dead slow. This would solve that problem nicely.
- wyldfire 10y agoWell, maybe. It would certainly improve. But you probaly still won't get anywhere near the GDDR5(etc) speeds from those memory accesses. Depending on the memory access pattern it might end up dropping down significantly. But you might still end up considering it "dead slow."
- phamilton 10y agoOn a CPU you'd have the same bottlenecks unless you fit the entire dataset in memory (which, admittedly is a possibility). Assuming you can't get the full dataset in memory, apples-to-apples you should be able to see a significant speedup on the GPU over the CPU. Previously this was not the case for large datasets.
- kartD 10y agoI think the main advantage is the GPU doesn't have to go through the CPU to get data. i.e. the transaction goes from this: GPU -> CPU -> HDD -> GPU to this: GPU -> HDD -> GPU
- AstralStorm 10y agoNot with an NGFF SSD. You can have direct memory access to one. That said, internal GPU bus might or might not be faster than PCIe. Oh and the fact that nobody write a specialised enough driver for a GPU to use this.
- wyldfire 10y agoSure, that part was clear. But the difference between "quite fast" for this application and "dead slow" might be that hundreds of GB/s with GDDRx/HBM is so much faster than anything else. Even the M.2 SSD onboard is probably only ~5GB/s. So if the walk pattern is something that is predictable enough by the GPU (usually pretty linear, but some memory features have 2d/3d locality), then you could crunch those numbers as fast as the SSD could deliver them. Now it becomes a question of how much computation/kernel time can you spend on a chunk of data?
- AIMunchkin 10y agoExcept that Pascal class GPUs support true unified virtual memory so some minor code changes might provide mostly the same performance using memory-mapped files. Caveat: I don't own a Pascal class GPU yet.
- PeCaN 10y agoUnless I'm misunderstanding you, unified virtual memory (while cool) doesn't really help get around the bottleneck of sending data to the GPU.
- AIMunchkin 10y agoIt would send data from CPU space at PCIE speeds (~10.5 GB/s). What's the bandwidth from that SSD? <1 GB/s? Seems like plenty of margin... That said, onboard SSD is cool if it can read without pre-empting the PCIE bus.
- zxcdw 10y agoThough unified virtual memory isn't limited to Pascal -- AMD's GCN architecture has supported it for years already, as do these products.
- nwah1 10y agoSurprisingly, this makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad that it uses an M.2 port. Thus, technically, you should be able to swap out the SSD for any screaming fast model you want.
- Chilinot 10y agoI can't find anything that supports your claim that it uses an M.2 port. But even if it does, sadly the SSD will most likely be soldered directly on the PCB like it is in most tablets and phones. It would have been really cool to have been able to swap it out as needed, but I don't think that will be doable :(
- Cau5tik 10y agoArs seems to imply that there will be two M.2 ports that users can populate. "Instead of adding more expensive graphics memory, why not let users add their own...The Radeon Pro SSG features two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for adding up to 1TB of NAND flash, " http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/amd-radeon-pro-ssg-graphics-card-specs-price-release-date/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/amd-radeon-pro-ssg-...
- jsheard 10y agoAnandtech say it has two M.2 x4 ports: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-polaris-with-m2-ssds-onboard http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro... And on the back you can see the standard tiered screw holes for fitting different M.2 card lengths: https://twitter.com/FudzillaNews/status/757774661081899008 https://twitter.com/FudzillaNews/status/757774661081899008
- redtuesday 10y agoHere is a video that shows the GPU in action: https://amp.twimg.com/v/b080f46d-e408-4348-864e-7cc12e40d1ac https://amp.twimg.com/v/b080f46d-e408-4348-864e-7cc12e40d1ac
- c2h5oh 10y agoThis might be useful for consumer cards as well: a tiny (0.25-2x VRAM) compiled shader or texture cache could possibly help with the framerate dips (microstutters). I know that PCIe bandwidth is not really an issue and SSD latency is significantly higher than RAM (but with NVMe pushing below 3 µs it makes you wonder how low a custom interface could go..)
- theandrewbailey 10y ago> The graphics card has already been demonstrated rendering a raw 8K video – the initial demo showed this running at 17 frames per second, and switching to the SSG, that was boosted to over 90 frames per second. I doubt that the same GPU was used. If it is, we're in trouble (or have unoptimized software). I thought that someone would have already solved the "let's stream data in and out and not interrupt whatever the GPU is doing" problem, but meanwhile many people are fretting over what PCIe version (thus, attained speeds) they can use.
- wyldfire 10y agoIndeed modern GPUs do copies over the bus while executing shaders/kernels. But once you saturate the bus, you are limited in how much shader execution you can accomplish as a result. If this scene required more textures than fit in memory, it would benefit from having a local DDR-accessible cache instead of having to grab it over PCIe.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoI agree, but... A GPU's 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 provide almost 16 GB/s of bandwidth. An M.2 SSD (used in this card) is at best 4 GB/s (PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes). This card has two M.2 slots. Even at those speeds, accessing data from system RAM is faster. (depends on specifics, but system RAM is easily 40+ GB/s) How does increasing data bandwidth 50% increase performance by 4? Are inefficiencies (and latencies) really eating up all that?
- sp332 10y agoWhat does "interrupt" mean here? If you don't have video data available to the card fast enough, it's not going to have anything to render.
- banachtarski 10y ago> "let's stream data in and out and not interrupt whatever the GPU is doing" You're quoting this but I'm not sure I understand what problem you're referencing. Streaming data to the GPU isn't a problem of interrupting it. GPUs use memory fences, atomics, and other things you might find in CPU land. Why are we in trouble if the demo was true? For every type of hardware, I can come up with a rendering algorithm and data set that makes it look better than similar hardware in a different configuration. If you have more memory bandwidth, you should be using it accordingly.
- pella 10y agohttp://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-polaris-with-m2-ssds-onboard http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro...
- ungzd 10y agoInstead of fixing bus that's too slow for SSD (really too slow?) they're made that hack with duct tape. And it surely has proprietary API and direct addressing (no filesystem) like in 50s. Then they'll integrate ethernet into video card for high speed traders (also can be marketed as lower latency for gaming). But why not to integrate whole PC into it? With gaming console-style OS on it.
- foldor 10y agoThat is certainly a lot of leaps you're taking there. There's no evidence to suggest any of those things you've implied.
- dingle_thunk 10y agoYou mean like an AMD APU?
- TheCartographer 10y agoProfessional GIS user here. Most of my high resolution terrain models are well within the capacity of even a modest GPU to load into WebGL and run on a browser without breaking a sweat. Terrain models are static by nature and don't require a lot of horsepower once they are loaded. The struggle comes in reading the data from storage, where several minutes can be spent loading in a single high resolution raster for analysis/display. When I built my own PC this year, I splurged on an M.2 SSD for the OS and my main data store. Best decision I ever made for my workflow - huge 3D scenes that formerly took minutes to load on a spinning platter now pop up in seconds. This thing would probably be the bees knees for what I do. Shame it starts at $10k (and that it's AMD so no CUDA, so no way to justify it at work for "data science" :-/).
- tankenmate 10y agoWell it will be a almost dead set certainty to run OpenCL, hopefully it will have bindings / extensions to handle the SSD directly from your OpenCL code. Then all you need to do is port the code.
- dingle_thunk 10y agoThe dev kit is $10k. I imagine the final product will be cheaper.
- thescriptkiddie 10y agoAny idea why Nvidia dominates in "serious" GPGPU applications? I remember people mocking them for refusing to adopt OpenCL, and when they finally caved their implementation performed far worse than AMDs. How did they win people over? Did they give out a bunch of free GPUs to universities or something?
- tankenmate 10y agoNVIDIA supports developers better than AMD does (on the whole). So they got CUDA working first, and helped developers get their computational frameworks running on CUDA easier and faster. That gave them several hardware generations of head start. If OpenCL 2.x becomes easier to support and more performant as Khronos claims then maybe there'll be a shift.
- FatalBaboon 10y agoDoes it only bug me that with the addition of cold storage on the card, GPUs scream of poor design? If I was rewriting the same-ish REST helper on every micro-service of a project, I would immediately think of refactoring and yet GPUs now have CPU/RAM/Disk. Is the future GPU-only or are we in dire need of a better way to use existing PC components from GPUs?
- Athas 10y agoI don't understand. What does hardware design have to do with refactoring, usually a software term? The addition of the SSD is motivated by basic physics, which creates the need for computational units and storage units to be close together. (The alternative would be a non-von Neumann model without this compute-storage distinction, but that's not so easy.)
- buzzybee 10y agoIt just means the Sutherland/Meyer Wheel of Reincarnation is in full effect.
- Sanddancer 10y agoLots of high end components has onboard RAM and flash. Big SAS cards have flash to store state in case of a power outage, there are realtime ethernet cards that control the entire ip stack themselves, etc. When you're working with huge datasets, it just makes sense to have data locality.
- protomok 10y agoI'm having trouble seeing the value add here. From the Anandtech article [1] they are using 2x512GB Samsung 950 Pro SSDs which use PCIE v3 x4 with M.2 connectors and a PCIE switch. The drives presumably are using NVME. The demo claims that without the SSDs they were rendering raw 8k video @17 fps and using the SSDs improved rendering to > 90fps. How can this be such a significant improvement over accessing the same SSDs connected directly to a motherboard? The graphics card would have a PCIE 3.0 x16 connection...plenty of bandwidth and very low latency. Maybe I'm missing something? [1] - http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-polaris-with-m2-ssds-onboard http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro...
- rtkwe 10y agoIt takes the CPU (and all the buses in between) out of the request pipeline.
- DigitalJack 10y agoThe writer had some of the same thoughts, and found this: "The performance differential was actually more than I expected; reading a file from the SSG SSD array was over 4GB/sec, while reading that same file from the system SSD was only averaging under 900MB/sec, which is lower than what we know 950 Pro can do in sequential reads. After putting some thought into it, I think AMD has hit upon the fact that most M.2 slots on motherboards are routed through the system chipset rather than being directly attached to the CPU. This not only adds another hop of latency, but it means crossing the relatively narrow DMI 3.0 (~PCIe 3.0 x4) link that is shared with everything else attached to the chipset."
- protomok 10y agoThanks, I missed this. I noticed that the PCIE 3.0 x1 bandwidth is just above what AMD reported in their throughput test - 985 MB/s...I wonder if AMD used a system with the SSD connected to a M.2 slot on the motherboard with just a PCIE 3.0 x1 link. I should clarify that I do think this onboard SSD concept could be really compelling for certain use cases, such as needing to store several hundred gigs of data which needs to be randomly accessed.
- Sylos 10y agoSo, what you're telling me is that I can now build a complete computer into my computer as graphics card?
- wyldfire 10y agoDepending on your perspective, your computer has contained several "computers" for many generations. Storage, network, display, and other adapters often have something like a CPU onboard capable of executing software instructions.
- ethagknight 10y agoHow long would an SSD last under a graphics card workload?
- Synaesthesia 10y agoSSD's are more durable and reliable than you might think.
- sp332 10y agoIt comes with a 10-year warranty, so it might not even matter. But back in 2014, 240GB drives were approaching a petabyte of continuous writes before failing. https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi... With a couple more years of manufacturing and wear-leveling improvements, and more space for the algorithms to play with, it could be a lot more now.
- mankash666 10y agoOn the contrary, SSD lifespans have actually decreased. Smaller transistors considerably reduce lifespan, and the advent of storing 2 (MLC) and 3 (TLC) bits per cell has hastened the trend. 3D-NAND uses different physics, but as of now hasn't yet matched legacy NAND's endurance (lifespan)
- Dylan16807 10y ago> 3D-NAND uses different physics, but as of now hasn't yet matched legacy NAND's endurance (lifespan) What makes you say that?
- mankash666 10y agoFacts make me say that. 3D-NAND uses charge-trap flash while planar NAND uses floating-gate-transistors based flash. Working in a NAND company also makes me say that.
- banachtarski 10y ago3 predictions: 1. GPU driven command buffer workloads will become more significant (now that literally all your textures can exist in VRAM, it's worth going the extra mile to elide a GPU-CPU round trip). 2. Voxel based techniques (which were generally memory intensive) open up again. That's modeling destructible environments, atmospheric effects, transparent materials, etc in a more accurate and performant way. 3. Entire scene graphs can live on the GPU which opens up a lot of design space for new volume hierarchies and data structures.
- tracker1 10y agoWith UHD and higher monitors coming down the pipeline, something like this could be a game changer for even gaming graphics... right now, the GTX 1080 can't consistently hit 60fps in newer games at 4K. Something like this could improve this a bit. Even the technique in adding say 64-128GB of secondary storage soldered onto the graphics board could be significant.
- floatboth 10y agonah, storage is not a problem with gaming these days! Wait for the Vega cards with 8GB of HBM2 — that will kick ass.
- mankash666 10y agoSounds like an excellent setup for machine learning / big-data workloads. People have already moved data-base computation to the GPU, providing low-latency NVM access to such a set-up would really accelerate things.
- mankash666 10y agoWhat if the next PSP or XBox used this architecture? Games could really fly!
- jamesfmilne 10y agoThis 8K video demo is stupid. Lets assume a relatively modest 8bit per component RGB, a 7680x4320 frame is 132MB, at 24fps is 3.2GB/s. So in 1TB you can store 312 seconds aka 5 mins of video. You're going to have to top this up to play any more than 5 mins, which means writing to the SSD at 3.2 GB/s whilst you read from it. I do not believe even any NVMe SSDs are full duplex, so that's 6.4GB/sec, which the SSDs cannot provide. You can DMA to GPU memory at 10GB/sec, so the SSDs are of no benefit for video. No-one stores 8K data uncompressed anyway, so the CPU will need to read and decompress the data. Perhaps it's useful for faulting in megatextures for 3D scenes though.
- sigi45 10y agoIt shows the bandwith bottleneck nicely.