5 ms·
I 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
by igrigorik 17y ago
I 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.