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> “We’re using the SSD as virtual RAM” Swap file as a selling point, hmm? If you’re leading with that, that makes me a little nervous for the rest of the “inno

> “We’re using the SSD as virtual RAM” Swap file as a selling point, hmm? If you’re leading with that, that makes me a little nervous for the rest of the “innovations.” Similarly, I laughed out loud when one of the talking heads in the video said “the SSD and the solid state drive.” Okay then.

t4h4 7y ago
He said "the SoC and the solid state drive"
- devilsbabe 7y ago
  Thanks. I had totally misheard that as "SSD and solid state drive" as well. Went back to listen and you're right
- stordoff 7y ago
  I too heard it as "SSD and solid state drive", so thanks for the clarification. I was picturing some sort of hierarchy of SSDs (which sounded insane).
jakear 7y ago
They also are using GDDR6 ram. I’d take the swap file comment as a bullshit marketing phrase the verge decided to highlight and leave it at that.
- cududa 7y ago
  Swap file memory is a “big deal” for consoles. Having worked on the 360 this is kinda a big deal. Even for the Xbox One, the only swap file concept was in the OS/ “dashboard”. I’m not aware of the PS3 or 4 ever having such a concept. SSD’s have traditionally served as an alternative to disc based games, not a functional element of system architecture
Mr_P 7y ago
This may be a reference to texture streaming. While I've never developed for consoles, I do know that texture streaming on desktop & mobile can be challenging. Being able to mmap a texture directly from ssd (as if it were RAM), with the hardware & os taking care of all the details, could be a big deal for developers. Edit: To get a sense of how challenging this can be, see this recent talk from GDC for texture streaming in Titanfall 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo . Literally all of this complexity would go away if you could mmap textures directly from disk and let the gpu handle it.
- fwip 7y ago
  To my ears, this sounds very similar to what AMD's "Vega" cards provided for high-end compute. The "High Bandwidth Cache Controller" allows datasets outside of the GPU's memory to be accessed in a transparent way. I can't find a decent technical article at the moment, but here's a link to the "Radeon SSG," a $7k graphics card that ships with 2TB of solid-state storage attached, designed to be used to process absolutely massive datasets as though they were in RAM: https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon-pro-ssg https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon...
- hybrids 7y ago
  Sounds similar to NVIDIA's GPU Direct RDMA in principle. https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect
tutanchamun 7y ago
Both the PS5 and Scarlett sound like a console implementation of AMDs Radeon Pro SSG. The Radeon Pro SSG has a PCIe3 x8 NVME SSD on the GPU PCB directly connected to the GPU and managed by HBCC which uses the 16 GB HBM2 memory as a first level cache to the SSD. I haven't had a console since the PS2 but the promise of a unified memory pool with GPU decompression (or dedicated hardware like in one of Sonys patents) a desktop class CPU and an SSD as the baseline (~100x better latency, ~40-50x better peak read etc. and games hopefully not developed with a HDD in mind anymore) looks really promising. Sadly the GPU increase will probably be eaten up mostly if they go for native 4k.

t4h4 7y ago

He said "the SoC and the solid state drive"

devilsbabe 7y ago
Thanks. I had totally misheard that as "SSD and solid state drive" as well. Went back to listen and you're right
stordoff 7y ago
I too heard it as "SSD and solid state drive", so thanks for the clarification. I was picturing some sort of hierarchy of SSDs (which sounded insane).

jakear 7y ago

They also are using GDDR6 ram. I’d take the swap file comment as a bullshit marketing phrase the verge decided to highlight and leave it at that.

cududa 7y ago
Swap file memory is a “big deal” for consoles. Having worked on the 360 this is kinda a big deal. Even for the Xbox One, the only swap file concept was in the OS/ “dashboard”. I’m not aware of the PS3 or 4 ever having such a concept. SSD’s have traditionally served as an alternative to disc based games, not a functional element of system architecture

Mr_P 7y ago

This may be a reference to texture streaming. While I've never developed for consoles, I do know that texture streaming on desktop & mobile can be challenging. Being able to mmap a texture directly from ssd (as if it were RAM), with the hardware & os taking care of all the details, could be a big deal for developers. Edit: To get a sense of how challenging this can be, see this recent talk from GDC for texture streaming in Titanfall 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo . Literally all of this complexity would go away if you could mmap textures directly from disk and let the gpu handle it.

fwip 7y ago
To my ears, this sounds very similar to what AMD's "Vega" cards provided for high-end compute. The "High Bandwidth Cache Controller" allows datasets outside of the GPU's memory to be accessed in a transparent way. I can't find a decent technical article at the moment, but here's a link to the "Radeon SSG," a $7k graphics card that ships with 2TB of solid-state storage attached, designed to be used to process absolutely massive datasets as though they were in RAM: https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon-pro-ssg https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon...
hybrids 7y ago
Sounds similar to NVIDIA's GPU Direct RDMA in principle. https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect

tutanchamun 7y ago

Both the PS5 and Scarlett sound like a console implementation of AMDs Radeon Pro SSG. The Radeon Pro SSG has a PCIe3 x8 NVME SSD on the GPU PCB directly connected to the GPU and managed by HBCC which uses the 16 GB HBM2 memory as a first level cache to the SSD. I haven't had a console since the PS2 but the promise of a unified memory pool with GPU decompression (or dedicated hardware like in one of Sonys patents) a desktop class CPU and an SSD as the baseline (~100x better latency, ~40-50x better peak read etc. and games hopefully not developed with a HDD in mind anymore) looks really promising. Sadly the GPU increase will probably be eaten up mostly if they go for native 4k.