2 (not 1) TB graphics buffer?!? AMD Radeon Pro SSG teaser...

tj_1ca9500b

OK, yeah this is a teaser at the moment, but yeah...

This is about the upcoming Radeon Pro SSG

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_tease_their_new_radeon_pro_ssg/1

And yeah, the 1 TB is a buffer so we are likely looking at higher latencies, so the 'onboard' gddr/hbm memory should still be important, but yeah, this intrigues me...

Probably not much help for Iray, but yeah... Should be interesting to see what happens with this product, and if NVidia will be firing back with a similar solution.  Volta looks very promising, but I haven't heard anything about a 1 TB buffer from team green as of yet.

tj_1ca9500b

OK, I just finished watching the livestream of AMD's analyst day (15 minute intermission as I type this).  Unfortunately, my connection dropped a couple of times, but I did catch this.

On one of the slides for Radeon Pro SSG, they talked about 2TB NVMe on the card along with 16 GB memory (HBM2 I think, that's been alluded to before).  They also showed a couple of demos of these cards, showing raytracing and 8K video editing.  Same card, with and without the cache coherency framework (if I remember the terminology correctly).  Without, studdering.  With, smooth as silk.  Apparently there are huge advantages here, even with using just NVMe as your 'cache'.

Vega Frontier is the name of the card they were showcasing in the presentation, and they expect to get it into the hands of some 'bleeding edge' professionals by the end of June.  Other (consumer) Vega cards are coming down the pipeline as well, but right now Iray is the big thing here, so I expect that most of you won't care as much.  However, Raja did specifically mention Cuda support (I'm thinking this is through 3rd party partners?) in the presentation, although it was a passing reference.

NVidia and Intel certainly are not standing still either, but this has to be one of the most exciting/disruptive years I've seen in the computing segment in a long time.

Lots of other tidbits in the presentation so far, but I think that AMD has come a LONG way in just a few short years.  This would be a very good time, if you aren't in a hurry to upgrade, to maybe wait a month or two and let things shake out a bit.  At the very least, the products you are looking at now may drop a bit in price as the next wave begins to hit the market.

Threadripper (16 Core/32 Thread) was formally announced today, along with EPYC (formally known as Naples?).  But this thread is mainly about the upcoming Vega GPU.with the onboard NVMe...

Edit: Here is some info about the upcoming Vega lineup, including presentation slides used in today's presentation:

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-radeon-pro-vega-ssg-detailed/

tj_1ca9500b

I love how a number of tech sites are glossing over/missing the Vega SSG's most important new feature (IMHO), the 2 TB of NVMe flash that is directly incorporated into the card.  That is probably the one thing that dramatically improves what this card can do.  Sure the 16GB of HBM is nice too, but for 3d content and 8k video editing, yeah this looks like a gamechanger to me.

They seem to be focused on Vega Frontier, which is understandable, since people are chomping at the bit to get Vega.

Of course, it's not slated to hit the market until late June, so it'll be a bit before we see independent benchmarks.

nonesuch00

tj_1ca9500b said:

I love how a number of tech sites are glossing over/missing the Vega SSG's most important new feature (IMHO), the 2 TB of NVMe flash that is directly incorporated into the card.  That is probably the one thing that dramatically improves what this card can do.  Sure the 16GB of HBM is nice too, but for 3d content and 8k video editing, yeah this looks like a gamechanger to me.

They seem to be focused on Vega Frontier, which is understandable, since people are chomping at the bit to get Vega.

Of course, it's not slated to hit the market until late June, so it'll be a bit before we see independent benchmarks.

What I read earlier that the GPU design would allow for streaming of 3D data from storage into it's RAM to give the illusion of RAM the size of RAM+size of the 3D data set with only a small i/o performance hit but I assumed they meant regular NVMe and other SSD storage on the PC. I didn't anticipate that they would also integrate 2TB NVMe storage on the video card as well. Hopefull the open source Prorenderer will be widely ported to different sw apps.