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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 02 2017, @09:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-remembers-CGA? dept.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vega-workstations-wx9100-pro-ssg,35128.html

AMD claims the Radeon Pro WX 9100 will double the performance of its previous-generation W9100, as well as fold in new functionality associated with the Vega architecture. For example, HBCC allows Vega 10 to fall back to main memory when on-package HBM2 is exhausted, enabling much larger data sets than were previously possible (even if this means incurring a performance hit from essentially paging data in and out of main memory).

AMD demonstrated loading a city model from Baahubali: The Beginning consisting of billions of polygons and rendering it using AMD's ProRender GPU renderer. Other GPUs would simply get an out-of-memory error when even attempting to load this, according to company representatives, but the WX 9100 managed to do so with a modicum of interactivity.

Building on the SSG (Solid State Graphics) technology announced at Siggraph last year, AMD will soon introduce the Radeon Pro SSG, a card that unites the SSG and Vega architecture. Performance-wise, the Radeon Pro SSG is said to be identical to the WX 9100. The difference is its on-board non-volatile storage.

The Vega architecture's HBCC means the SSG memory can function more seamlessly, allowing the solid state storage to be seen and used as local memory for loading extremely large data sets. The version of the card that AMD announced has 2TB of SSG memory on it, and that extra space is capable of up to 8 GBps reads and 6 GBps writes. While that's much slower than the on-package HBM2 the Vega 10 uses as cache, it's still faster than going across PCI Express to system memory and back.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 03 2017, @02:52AM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday August 03 2017, @02:52AM (#548201) Journal

    Those bytes are not more expensive than VRAM/HBM. Write cycles will depend on the type of NAND used... given the insanely (in terms of SSDs) fast speeds they have cranked it up to, they might be using SLC or MLC.

    The first generation product apparently carried 2x Samsung 950 PRO SSDs inside. Which use MLC V-NAND rather than TLC NAND V-NAND. Less endurance than SLC but not as bad as TLC.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-pro-ssg,32365.html [tomshardware.com]
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb [anandtech.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday August 03 2017, @05:41PM (3 children)

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Thursday August 03 2017, @05:41PM (#548434)

    MLC is really a great middle ground - while the write cycles will surely be strained more greatly when used as memory rather than storage, if those components are user replaceable, or even factory replaceable for a nominal charge, I would think they would be successful.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:13PM (2 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:13PM (#548453) Journal

      By the time the NAND in these things fails, which could be 5-10 years, Disney et al. will want newer graphics cards / SSGs anyway.

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      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 04 2017, @02:51AM (1 child)

        by kaszz (4211) on Friday August 04 2017, @02:51AM (#548565) Journal

        Or it could be 10 months. Which costs the end user dearly. Aggravated by perverted incentives.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 04 2017, @03:15AM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 04 2017, @03:15AM (#548583) Journal

          http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/radeon-pro-wx-9100-2017jul30.aspx [amd.com]

          Both the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG are designed by AMD and engineered with a consistent bill of materials and the highest quality components offering stable, reliable performance. A three-year limited warranty and optional seven-year limited warranty is offered on the retail version of the Radeon Pro WX 9100, and a two-year limited warranty is offered on the Radeon Pro SSG.

          So it doesn't matter if it fails in 10 months.

          2 years is not a very long warranty for the SSG, but chances are that it will last longer and new GPUs will be out within that time frame. It may be possible to swap in new SSDs to prolong the usefulness of the card. It may even work after the SSD portion fails, because the SSG is simply a WX 9100 with added 2 TB of NAND.

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