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The huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have 4 PCIe M
by nicktelford 9y ago
The huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have 4 PCIe M2 SSDs (that's a bit under 16Gbps bandwidth, assuming RAID0), and still have 44 lanes (the number in the top-end Intel CPU) to spare for GPUs and other peripherals.
- vbezhenar 9y agoI don't fully understand. So 1 SSD need 1 lane. How many lanes need something like NVisia 1080Ti? What use of the remaining lanes? If I want to build something like 1 CPU/1 GPU/1 SSD configuration without additional peripherals, 62 lanes will be effectively wasted?
- imeron 9y agoThe newer M.2 SSDs suck up 4 lanes. That's 16 lanes for four drives, burning through all available lanes on a Kaby Lake CPU.
- masklinn 9y ago> burning through all available lanes on a Kaby Lake CPU. Don't you also get something like 4x via the chipset through DMI?
- floatboth 9y agoA GPU can use 16x 3.0 lanes, theoretically. In practice 8 lanes is enough, people have measured performance between 16x and 8x, it's almost the same. SSDs use 4x, if you do buy an NVMe drive that is. (In my country, these things are TWICE as expensive as SATA SSDs lol)
- shaklee3 9y agoMaybe for games, but for cuda this is certainly not the case. Double the lanes is double the host to device bandwidth.
- Klathmon 9y agoAnd even for games, the only reason it's not a difference is because game developers target less bandwidth between CPU and GPU so they don't use it all. If we move to a future where every GPU has a lot more bandwidth then games would most likely start taking advantage of it.
- floatboth 9y ago"CUDA" is not a particular application. You could very well be doing something with CUDA that does extremely little data transfer to/from the host, but a lot of computation on the GPU. Like mining :D Also, host to device can be bottlenecked by memory speed on either side.
- shaklee3 9y agoCUDA meaning GPGPU. All I was pointing out is that there is definitely a bandwidth doubling going from 8 to 16 lanes. It's used extremely often by people using the cards for compute. Mining may not have that issue, but deep learning and other applications do.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoMy current “gaming machine” is still using PCIe 1.0 and it doesn't look like it's proving much at all of a bottleneck, because why would it? The game loads most things into memory once and then the rest of the time it's just sending draw calls and maybe geometry updates.
- ionised 9y agoHow are you measuring this?
- vladimirralev 9y agoThis is for high-end workstations after all. Many people are suffering with video production. New cameras this year output 8K video raw (or slightly compressed). Even the guys in RED couldn't produce hardware to properly feed the stream into a computer realtime or at least without having to wait.
- masklinn 9y ago> I don't fully understand. So 1 SSD need 1 lane. M.2 SSDs supports up to PCIe 4x, though there are also PCIe card formats which support 8x and 16x: http://blog.seagate.com/intelligent/seagate-demonstrates-fastest-ever-ssd-flash-drive/ http://blog.seagate.com/intelligent/seagate-demonstrates-fas... > How many lanes need something like NVisia 1080Ti? 16 per (technically they need 4 per — that's what TB3 gives — or possibly less, but they'll use 16 if they can) > If I want to build something like 1 CPU/1 GPU/1 SSD configuration without additional peripherals, 62 lanes will be effectively wasted? You're at 24 lanes for the GPU (16), SSD (4) and southbridge (4). And unused lanes are no more wasted than unused USB slots, seriously. But remember that Threadripper is an enthusiast's platform, people who might have 2~4 SSDs (8~16 lanes) or SLI GPUs (2x16).
- mtgx 9y agoThis is an interesting possibility: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6ee5qw/thanks_to_threadrippers_64_pcielanes_new_systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6ee5qw/thanks_to_threa...
- deelowe 9y agoThese comments baffle me. Doesn't the majority of HN work in the industry? Clearly the driving factor regarding IO at this point is machine learning and networking for cloud applications, not gaming. Desktop/workstation (e.g. gaming) performance hasn't been driving the industry for easily 5 years now. Intel and AMD both simply use their high performance desktop offerings as proofs for their server solutions, which typically come a few months later.
- frou_dh 9y agoConsumers tend to be limited by not having many PCIe SSDs in RAID0? Who are these people and what do they need galactic disk bandwidth for?
- nicktelford 9y agoEnthusiasts tend to be gamers, and once you have a high end machine, most games tend to be limited on disk bandwidth, which affects load times. By consumers, I meant enthusiasts, since that's who the Threadripper (X399) and Intel's Extreme Edition (X299) platforms are aimed at.
- frou_dh 9y agoThat sounds frivolous versus a single high-end PCIe SSD. Wouldn't be surprised if the improvement in real-world game load times wasn't even perceptible.
- ux-app 9y ago>That sounds frivolous Maybe, but that's what being an enthusiast is all about :) also assets (models & textures) need to be loaded from disk during game-play which can result in stutter when gaming. Faster IO would help here.
- frou_dh 9y agoOur baseline of a single high-end PCIe SSD isn't slow, though. This comparison is ultra high bandwidth vs ultra ultra high bandwidth.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoA lot of processing happens when games load. Once you have sufficient storage bandwidth and latency, load times flatten out. It seems that "sufficient" is SATA; above that, there is little difference in game load times: https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4 https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ss...
- elorant 9y agoRealistically speaking, what's the use case for something like that? And secondly, how much a mobo like that would cost?
- redtuesday 9y agoIntel X99 mainboards (socket 2011-3) ranged from 200-600 us dollars. AMDs offerings typically go for less than Intels, but Threadripper has an gigantic 4094 pin LGA socket, so I guess this will negate the typical AMD price advantage regarding motherboards and we will see prices in the 200-600 us dollar range as well. EDIT - and since Threadripper will have 20 more PCIe lanes compared to Intels i9 series, motherboard makers will hopefully take advantage of this to offer more IO, which probably also increases the price.