2 ms·
For starters, the compression hardware isn't part of the SSD. But more importantly, transparent decompression has been implemented many times on many systems;
by wtallis 6y ago
For starters, the compression hardware isn't part of the SSD.
But more importantly, transparent decompression has been implemented many times on many systems; it's not a pipe dream. Developers don't have to do much of anything special to use the decompression hardware. They just have to use the platform's standard APIs for reading data from disk, and the OS or standard library takes care of routing it through the hardware offloads. From the application programmer's perspective, the decompression just shifts the performance characteristics of the storage a bit—higher latency, higher throughput, stronger preference for certain block sizes.
The bigger question is whether developers will be able to make good use of high bandwidth storage, regardless of how that storage is provided. Replacing everything in RAM on a ~2 second timescale is pretty wild. Lots of game engines have systems to coordinate loading assets on the fly, and the scalability limits of those existing solutions are going to be tested.