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I agree with your point in general, but if coffeebus' assertion that SSD access will become limited by the bus, it still makes sense to allow programs to be sen
by DougWebb 17y ago
I agree with your point in general, but if coffeebus' assertion that SSD access will become limited by the bus, it still makes sense to allow programs to be sent to run directly on the SSD. Remember, video cards originally were just big ram buffers that were accessed directly by the CPU, but that wasn't fast enough so now we have shaders on the cards. Having something similar in an SSD will allow a lot of data searching and crunching to happen on the SSD, and it'll run in parallel with whatever else the CPU might be busy doing.
- igrigorik 17y agoI see your point, but I'm not convinced that the amount of data (raw volume size) and the read speeds of flash lead to the same behavior as shaders + GPU. GPU's are processing an order (or several) of magnitude more data, which makes shaders a useful feature: data and computation locality. Flash is 10x slower than RAM (in an ideal case), and even then, we haven't had the need to introduce 'shader like' features into RAM - yes, because historically we haven't stored all that much in it, but even with modern 64Gb configurations, same thing...
- DougWebb 17y agoI don't think the comparison is Flash vs RAM, I think it's "directly-accessed Flash" vs "Flash on the other side of a PCI-E bus". We don't need anything like a shader for RAM because the bus RAM is attached to is fast. The question at hand is whether the Flash on an SDD is best accessed as a SATA device, DMA Flash over PCI-E (or some new slot technology), or through shader-like cpus on the same card as the Flash.