AMD Radeon Pro SSG - a BETA product for 10000$

[zMeul]

source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-polaris-with-m2-ssds-onboard

 

Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics

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Details are a bit thin and I’ll update this later this evening, but in short the card utilizes a Polaris 10 GPU and includes 2 PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for adding flash drives to the card. These slots are then attached to the GPU (it’s unclear if there’s a PCIe switch involved or if it’s wired directly), which the GPU can then use as an additional tier of storage. I’m told that the card can fit at least 1TB of NAND – likely limited by M.2 MLC SSD capacities – which massively increases the amount of local storage available on the card.

 

so .. what the fuck is this?

one one hand, having extra storage directly available to the GPU as a n^th cache level seems OK, until you start thinking about it - it's still slower than RAM, still slower than VRAM

to have a PCIe SSD attached to the GPU you need a controller and I seriously doubt AMD put one in the GPU, so it's external with some sort of BUS to it; and it's also available as local storage

 

we'll have to see actual real world scenarios of this card

 

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updated: https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Introduces-Radeon-Pro-SSG-Professional-GPU-Paired-Low-Latency-Flash-Storage-

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UPDATE (July 27th, 1am ET):  More information on the Radeon Pro SSG has surfaced since the original article. According to AnandTech, the prototype graphics card actually uses an AMD Fiji GPU. The Fiji GPU is paired onboard PCI-E based storage using the same PEX8747 bridge chip used in the Radeon Pro Duo. Storage is handled by two PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 slots that can accommodate up to 1TB of NAND flash storage. As I mentioned below, having the storage on board the graphics card vastly reduces latency by reducing the number of hops and not having to send requests out to the rest of the system. AMD had more numbers to share following their demo, however.

 

From the 8K video editing demo, the dual Samsung 950 Pro PCI-E SSDs (in RAID 0) on board the Radeon Pro SSG hit 4GB/s while scrubbing through the video. That same video source stored on a Samsung 950 Pro attached to the motherboard had throughput of only 900MB/s. In theory, reaching out to system RAM still has raw throughput advantages (with DDR4 @ 3200 MHz  on a Haswell-E platform theroretically capable of 62 GB/s reads and 47 GB/s writes though that would be bottlenecked by the graphics card having to go over the PCI-E 3.0 x16 link and it's maximum of 15.754 GB/s.). Of course if you can hold it in (much smaller) GDDR5 (300+GB/s depending on clocks and memory bus width) or HBM (1TB/s) and not have to go out to any other storage tier that's ideal but not always feasible especially in the HPC world.

 

 

Edited July 27, 2016 by zMeul

[thekeemo]

Why not normal ram? or laptop ram.

[Hunter259]

[thekeemo]

Just now, Hunter259 said:

 

Some rendering processes take a ton of vram

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

Why not normal ram? or laptop ram.

Custom ram controller so either anouther die for this product, or a chip to convert it, thus making it slower.

[thekeemo]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Custom ram controller so either anouther die for this product, or a chip to convert it, thus making it slower.

isnt it the same thing with the nvme drive though?

[Hunter259]

Just now, thekeemo said:

Some rendering processes take a ton of vram

 

Laptop ram would be much faster and better for this task.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, thekeemo said:

Some rendering processes take a ton of vram

 

Yea, but its going to be slow slow with a ssd instead of ram. They already have cards with 32gb of vram. Also your not buying this card for rendering, buy a firepro if you do it professionally.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, thekeemo said:

isnt it the same thing with the nvme drive though?

Yep, unless its what i think it is a just using software.

 

So ssd to pcie to cpu to pcie to cpu.

 

Its goin to be slow.

 

Might as well use the m.2 slot on you motherboard.

[thekeemo]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea, but its going to be slow slow with a ssd instead of ram. They already have cards with 32gb of vram. Also your not buying this card for rendering, buy a firepro if you do it professionally.

AMD has been moving towards unifying them

 

Just now, Hunter259 said:

Laptop ram would be much faster and better for this task.

thats what I said

[thekeemo]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yep, unless its what i think it is a just using software.

 

So ssd to pcie to cpu to pcie to cpu.

 

Its goin to be slow.

 

Might as well use the m.2 slot on you motherboard.

I think its just gpu controller drive

[Hunter259]

Just now, thekeemo said:

AMD has been moving towards unifying them

 

thats what I said

Oh. Well my point still stands. Why? It seems just. IDK. Wasteful?

[zMeul]

9 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

Why not normal ram? or laptop ram.

I'm guessing density and price/GB

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

AMD has been moving towards unifying them

The cooler sucks for servers. blowers don't work for 1u servers.

[zMeul]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yep, unless its what i think it is a just using software.

 

So ssd to pcie to cpu to pcie to cpu.

 

Its goin to be slow.

 

Might as well use the m.2 slot on you motherboard.

the on board m.2 slot seems to be controller by the GPU, not directly

but it will not issue CPU calls to access it

[thekeemo]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The cooler sucks for servers. blowers don't work for 1u servers.

something like this would be in something like a 4u+ server with 8 in one chasis

[Belgarathian]

FINALLY. Saying you have 1TB of VRAM when you have no idea what you're talking about might be true. 

 

In other news, this could be incredibly useful for compute workloads for data rich environments such as geotech.

[thekeemo]

more info http://www.tweaktown.com/news/53139/amds-radeon-pro-ssg-handles-8k-96fps-thanks-board-2-ssd/index.html I think this is a move to get more pro software to support amd

[Zodiark1593]

Given the price, there will probably only be a few made, possibly to order, and is simply testing the viability of the concept in real-world workloads. If the data access is fast enough to keep the GPU fed, I'm sure there are a few individuals who know what to do with TBs of VRAM. 

[TrigrH]

 

he mentions that video scrubbing went from 17 to 90 FPS

[Electronics Wizardy]

56 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

something like this would be in something like a 4u+ server with 8 in one chasis

Still a bad cooler. You want a passive cooler with the front and back open. Like the tesla k80 https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+k80&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQpa3FopDOAhVN0WMKHXbUAEEQ_AUICygE&biw=900&bih=1537#imgrc=gB2m7zjsEvwN4M%3A

[NumLock21]

Nothing new. Old gpus lets you do that too. No not your socket 775 days. Much older.

[thekeemo]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Still a bad cooler. You want a passive cooler with the front and back open. Like the tesla k80 https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+k80&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQpa3FopDOAhVN0WMKHXbUAEEQ_AUICygE&biw=900&bih=1537#imgrc=gB2m7zjsEvwN4M%3A

Maybe, maybe not. However it is reminiscent of the intel phi cards.

[zMeul]

45 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

he mentions that video scrubbing went from 17 to 90 FPS

this needs to be tested by someone else

AMD has a history of bending the truth

 

and here is what I'm talking about:

 

what SSD is the one on the right that does 4590MB/s?!

 

a 950PRO does around 700MB/s in random 4k q32 reads and peaks at about 2.5GB/s in sequential

unless they put 2 in RAID 0 and compared to a single one - that's just misrepresenting the product .. basically lying trough their teeth

Edited July 26, 2016 by zMeul

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, thekeemo said:

Maybe, maybe not. However it is reminiscent of the intel phi cards.

There is no space for the cards to intake air form. The xeon phis are for workstations. Servers have high power fans, so a cpu or gpu fan isn't needed. There are xeon phi's that are made for servers that have no fans, like this one https://www.google.com/search?q=xeon+phi&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwje7rzQo5DOAhVEHGMKHdYUAuEQ_AUICygE&biw=900&bih=1537#imgrc=pKIIoryQhAeVlM%3A