The SemiAccurate web site reports that AMD is putting large solid-state drives directly onto workstation-class graphics processing cards, and calling the result "SSG". Charlie Demerjian wrote in the story that this will be a revolutionary new technology:
The first demo AMD is said to be showing is a use case for movie editing and cleanup on the GPU. What is the issue here you may ask, this is old hat and has been done on the CPU for years. Some GPUs can even assist it without slowing things down in the process, so what does SSG add? How about 8K movie streaming and cleanup in realtime. At 96FPS. Sure you can do this with traditional methods but the best of them will run the same task at 17FPS.
AMD is happy to point out this is a 5.6x speedup or so for the cost of two consumer SSDs. Before SSG, possible but slow. After SSG, fast enough for most users. The impossible, realtime 8K cleanup, is now possible.
[...] It really is the technology of the year and the impossible tasks made possible already are just the tip of the iceberg. SemiAccurate is not joking when we say this is a fundamental game changer for graphics, nothing like this has happened in years.
takyon: It is a proof of concept and is being pitched for Hollywood editing/rendering, the oil & gas industry, and medical imaging.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday August 01 2016, @09:44PM
First, move all the RAM to HBM, then use the HBM to cache the SSD.
At that point, engineers will start agreeing with marketing guys about the Substrate being a real system-on-chip.