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AMD Prepares To Ship Gaming SSDs
Lucas123 writes An AMD website in China has leaked information about the upcoming release of a line of SSDs aimed at gamers and professionals that will offer top sequential read/write speeds of 550MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively. AMD confirmed the upcoming news, but no pricing was available yet. The SSDs will come in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities and will use Toshiba's 19-nanometer flash lithography technology. According to IHS, AMD is likely entering the gaming SSD market because desktop SSD shipments are expected to experience a 39% CAGR between now and 2018.
It is the slowest and built utilizing last generation tech with a noisy fan, but has mediocre graphics acceleration and 250 meg suites of drivers that can break between releases
http://saveie6.com/
So what are the trade offs?
Why shouldn't I buy this for my regular desktop?
Assuming the spec sheet is accurate, the drive will use Toshiba flash and a 'Barefoot 3' controller(Indilinx, formerly OCZ, deathbed acquisition by Toshiba).
Unsurprisingly enough, Toshiba also sells SSDs with Toshiba flash and Indilinx controllers(the only surprising part is keeping the 'OCZ' brand to do so). Where does AMD come in? I assume they aren't hoping to lose money by doing this; but I am having some trouble figuring out how.
So what would be the difference between SSDs for gamers and those for non-gamers? The specs appear to be fairly normal high end for the current SSD market, but nothing exceptional. Maybe a sticker on it displaying a demon wielding an oversized SF gun?
Indeed.
99% of games have absolutely no performance issues on a Mac. They also take waaaay less space in a Mac's SSD. And they are also way cheaper.
Seems odd to call them "gaming SSDs" when they sound like just really fast SSDs. I'm actually surprised they are marketing them that way - especially since they'd reach a wider market if the didn't just target gamers.
Plus are games really that much faster? When I bought my Samsung 840 I put everything on there. However as soon as I found out that the load times in HL2 weren't noticeably different (probably because the longest part of the "please wait" wasn't disk access) I quickly shifted the entire "steamapps" folder to my HDD.
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4th post from my MacBook Pro with an SSD ;)
Mod down for using an apple product!
How long ago and what were the games? On startup, The Witcher 2 (which isn't even a very recent game anymore) seems to read several hundred MBs and then loads more for each environment. Fast random reads would seem to be a benefit there - the CPU in my laptop isn't at 100% even reading the data from SSD...
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Trying to find a positive spin on this but.... no. Anyone?
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Sure, 39% CAGR, but what about the 390ppm ADGG on the CKOI? What does IHS think about that?
That depends ENTIRELY on what game. SWTOR is highly dependant on the HD. Loading into fleet on a normal HD can take a few minutes. Use a SSD, and it takes 30s. And CPU barely registers a blip until you actually fully get into the game.
"top sequential read/write speeds of 550MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively."
Current SSDs already HAVE those speeds. So why bother?
Overpriced devices sold to people who are not me may result in lower prices for me due to economy of scale.
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Could you... use fewer Acronyms? I didn't understand anything.
As somebody with an SSD who watches a lot of twitch, I promise you, an SSD makes a huge difference. I always wonder why it's taking them so long to load a level, then remember, they probably don't have an SSD.
I recently added a 64gig SSD To a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18. yes a billion year old PATA laptop and it made an insane difference. Enough that the laptop was useable again for emergency services tasks. So instead of spending $4500 per truck again for new toughbooks, we are just upgrading all of the old laptops to SSD drives.
Dirt cheap too if you use mSATA and mSATA to PATA adapters.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's an SSD, the entire point is to not spin.
games generally write very little to the drive. it's all about read speeds.
Since those are only reached at queue depths at 16, 32 or higher - which you'll never reach on a desktop machine.
What you want is a drive with high IOPS at queue depths of 1, 2 and 4, maybe 8 as well.
The higher the IOPS at the lowest queues, the more responsive your machine feels.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
To me thats the only thing different about gaming gear (well... and flames!)
Do you know why it's cheaper to play games on Mac? Because there's only a tiny fraction of computer games available for it.
Posted from my Mac mini.
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Mod parent up.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Welcome to the no spin zone.
What games did they test? I've certainly seen games where a SSD made a BIG difference to loading times (roller coaster tycoon 3 springs to mind)
If the game just wants to load a big block of predetermined data from a sequential set of locations in a data file then HDD is fine, the problem comes when due to either lack of optimisation or the open/flexible nature of the game it needs to load lots of small peices in a non-sequential manner than a SSD makes a big difference.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
... when gaming was the rocket science of computing. All the new and interesting stuff was first tested on gamers. Since the last console generation made devs work on the same hardware for almost a decade, it became irrelevant to get a faster, better hardware. They managed to kill rapid innovation and the pc market. Now when you get "gamer" stuff, it's all about the looks.
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE!
Sorry, NOT playing that game again.
Crappy product from a customer-hostile company?
Fuck that noise.
Maybe AMD will make a sound marketing choice based on sound engineering again. But I'm not going to volunteer to hold my breath.
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THANK GOD!!!
My SSD vs. my old 10k velicoraptor loads zones in a certain MMO (not WoW) like 5s vs 30s+
-SaNo
AMD, come on. Focus on refreshing your top lineup of CPUs, or become irrelevant.
Yawn. Plain vanilla SATA SSDs are a dime a dozen.
Wake me up when NVME enabled, 4 lane PCI express, M.2 or SATA Express SSDs become available.
SATA was designed for spinning rust drives and 6 gigabits (Along with encoding overhead) is a significant bottleneck
Even that's not enough. Even if your PCI express connected SSD is fast, most still present themselves as generic AHCI devices. That works, but was also designed for old hard drives that can realistically only read and write one thing at a time. Only one queue, and a shallow queue depths. SSDs have no such limitation. All SSD controllers read and write multiple flash chips. NVME is a new protocol to replace AHCI and it's designed with flash storage in mind. Lots of deep queues no waiting in line for your data.
I'm sure the filesystem is next. Nearly all are designed for hard drives (outside of a few designed for embedded systems to store data on raw flash with minimal abstraction), and there are improvements to be made because waiting for platters to spin and heads to move is a thing of the past.
But I read somewhere this week that it's made by toshiba and they have crappy ssd's.
I've certainly seen games where a SSD made a BIG difference to loading times (roller coaster tycoon 3 springs to mind)
RCT3 takes about 10 seconds to start up on mine, and about 10 seconds to load a level. After that, it does everything on the fly. You'll load a level once every few hours or so (10000 seconds), so an SSD would result in a performance increase of about 0.1% on my system.
I run a couple of cheap stock 7200rpm hard drives striped, so a bit faster than most.
Someone had to ask.
And the news arrives just on the day my Intel 330 SSD at work died (which is the second SSD which gave me problems).. Even though I have a Samsung 840 EVO at home, I still am very hesitant on SSD's in regard to durability and reliability...
yeah, because apple uses all the highest end GPUs to power that retina display, huh?
but I kinda like load screens. I have a 10k rpm velociraptor for my games and some stuff already loads too quickly for my liking (and its not like the HDD is super fast).
modern games were built with loading screens in mind, and some loading screens can be pretty fancy. I like to see em.
You'll load a level once every few hours or so (10000 seconds), so an SSD would result in a performance increase of about 0.1% on my system.
If your gaming sessions are only 1 minute each, you'll get up to 50% more playing time out of that.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
*Not posted from anykind of apple product*
For the past year or two more and more drive are stuck at the 550mb/second mark. Where is sata 4, running at 1200mb/s or better ?
is AMD wants to be able to sell you a PC ready to go. APU+Storage+Ram = computer, and in a few more years the APUs will be fast enough to hang with current gen consoles.
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