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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.
You game will load 0.2 seconds faster than a standard SSD but you'll pay $150 more for it. Enjoy.
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?
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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Wait, what?
I didn't RTFA, but judging from the title, wasn't this about SSDs and not about GPUs? Or do SSDs also have active cooling and large drivers now?
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Indeed. Throwing away the 12ms average seek time of an HDD is the main attraction for getting an SSD. Almost all users would be happy even with an older 100MB/s SSD, provided that it had enough capacity.
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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If games actually load that much data at once, I obviously have to cancel my comment.
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.
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.
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.
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It's all to do with the CAGR. In the face of a 39% CQGR AMD are facing a 62.3% CHRP next year, so need to offset that by developing a product line with at least a 22.5% QRPD.
It's an SSD, the entire point is to not spin.
Perhaps it's not as much about needing to load a lot of data overall, but SSDs might allow you to delay loading parts of the contents until it is needed, because you can be sure that the worst-case (or even just 99th percentile) latency is much lower.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Current SSDs already HAVE those speeds. So why bother?
It's actually pretty easy to get those same speeds using 5-8 spinning disks in a RAID stripe. Where SSDs really shine is in random reads and writes.
I use both on my desktop...a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO and five 2TB Western Digital Red (5400rpm) drives in RAID-5. Uncached reads and writes are about 400MB/sec on the array, and about 580MB/sec on the SSD. The two biggest differences are the SSD achieves those speeds at pretty much every block size of at least 4KB, while the disks need 64KB block sizes, and the SSD can also do so in random access.
Note that even an "uncached" write is cached with Samsung's "Rapid" mode, and the SSD can sustain "writes returned to calling app" at over 2GB/sec for about 5 seconds, assuming you have enough RAM and a UPS for safety. With caching, level loading in games is almost completely CPU bound on my system, as it has 64GB of RAM.
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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My SSD vs. my old 10k velicoraptor loads zones in a certain MMO (not WoW) like 5s vs 30s+
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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.
You game will load 0.2 seconds faster than a standard SSD but you'll pay $150 more for it. Enjoy.
If the games I've bought recently are anything to go by, it won't load any faster, because it's already loaded all the useful stuff from disk by the time you get to the end of the unskippable videos advertising AMD GPUs and the Unreal engine.
You game will load 0.2 seconds faster than a standard SSD but you'll pay $150 more for it. Enjoy.
If the games I've bought recently are anything to go by, it won't load any faster, because it's already loaded all the useful stuff from disk by the time you get to the end of the unskippable videos advertising AMD GPUs and the Unreal engine.
Simple, go into the game contents and delete the unskippable videos, the game will load even faster becasue it's not loading the videos and video player.
Works just fine even with Steam games.
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.
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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...
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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