Gadgetory

following AMD's SIGGRAPH announcement of their Radeon Pro SSG or solid-state graphics we followed up with Andy to talk about more of the specs on this device it's we don't have everything but we've got a good amount now so first of all I spoke to Andy is Robert Jamison who gave us a bit more information on the SSG from Radeon Pro this is not a gaming card but it is very interesting to the industry because it may be something that we see in the future so SSG solid-state graphics there is effectively a solid state drive volt bolted on to the video card that's what's new here other than that it's the the same thing that we always know for GPUs so or for video cards so there's a card it's PCB goes into a PCIe slot there's a GPU on it which is by the way a last generation chip not Polaris the WX 70 150 140 101 pro cards are the only Radeon Pro cards from that SIGGRAPH announcement that are on Polaris this SSG is on the last generation so that aside video card goes into a PCIe slot standard PCB with a GPU standard V RAM on the card even the only thing that that's different is this extended frame buffer so it's a one terabyte extended frame buffer effectively again an SSD bolted to the card and that SSD which AMD is calling an SSG or solid-state graphics because does function differently the SSG pulls eight lanes from the allocated lanes to the card so if you've got it in a 16 slot then eight of those lanes will communicate with the rest of the car the GPU and then the remaining eight lanes will talk to the solids a graphics device or power it anyway so that's the the big thing here you may be asking if we're taking eight lanes from the GPU does it sort of reduce the theoretical maximum bandwidth that the the card can push and therefore reduce its performance but because of the way this system works it actually comes out as a positive with those eight lanes being allocated to local on card storage the extended frame buffer it uses a NAND flash which we explained in another video with an animation that you can see on the screen now it's effectively again an SSD on the GPU and that allows production news to store local large files that are actively being crunched by the GPU so whenever the GPU needs a large texture or big data or composite objects it will talk to the CPU and the CPU then talks to system storage or memory or wherever that data may be located and if that data happens to be loaded it from the system's SSD or hard drive or a network drive you encounter a lot of latency so the SSD bypasses this by storing local files for entire projects at one time so this is something that you kind of use on a project project basis with the production or workstation environments and if we take an example of an architectural CAD model you might be marking a city using ray tracing for example to determine where light will hit as it interacts with your building so the example that AMD gave us was in Europe there are apparently laws that restrict buildings from blocking light as it interacts with other buildings so you can't build something that's just gonna abstract light for the whole city and that can be modeled with ray tracing in these applications and it's pretty intensive on the GPU so to load massive CAD models takes a lot of time as the GPU paint ponds with system storage from in some cases minutes to an hour and an SSG means that you can eliminate the communication over the PCIe bus to the CPU and then you further eliminate that communication from the cpu to storage and then back again to the GPU that is a lot of physical distance across the board and products and everything in the system it's also a lot of latency that gets cut down I've asked for a specific number by the way on the latency haven't gotten one yet but well you know if we do get one the GPU can now directly communicate with local storage with that SSG on there it's up to one terabyte as I said and that's mostly usable if the vram capacity on the card has been exceeded which it probably will be with these production work cases so and these rep told us that the card will probably have four gigabytes of RAM a VRAM rather but he said it might be more but it is a one terabyte confirmed on the SSD so right now today the card is being sold exclusively as a pre-order with a dev kit only there's no standalone card available but there's good reason for that because you can do anything with a standalone card just yet so a dev kit which includes the let's see includes the card developer support of course from AMD and their software team and andy built api to make the card actually work with software and documentation that's ten thousand dollars the card itself will be coming out separately at some point but this is what you can get right now for the workstation users and in terms of using this card out of box you really can't right now so the applications have to be specifically and purpose-built for this on card storage because it's not a normal thing so you they have to be built to accommodate that and make sure it's actually being leveraged to its fullest potential and andy has told us that they're working with ISPs already to build existing applications to support an SSG so good news on that front and then the rest of it basically if you are one of these people you would use the dev kits to sort of build your internal or other applications to support an SSG and once all that software is built the GPU can basically dump geometry textures composite objects shaders all these models onto the SSG rather than onto vram and then purge that over and over and over again or painting the SSD on the system and that helps with real time scrubbing and camera angle modifications for animations where you're not sure of where you want the camera angle to be but you don't want to render it out at super low resolutions just to play around this bypasses that AMD scrubbed 8k video from at 90 plus FPS from 17 fps previously without the SSD so that was their demo at SIGGRAPH anyway we'll see how it works out there in the real world speeds we're looking at a 3 to 4x gain / system storage in terms of operating speed with this card for large models but a lot more info closer to availability which will be in 2017 probably pretty early that's all for this as always pitch online commercial video links in the description below I'll see you all next time