AMD tease their new Radeon Pro SSG
AMD tease their new Radeon Pro SSG
AMD announced their Radeon Pro SSG GPU with 1TB of onboard memory, the world’s first Solid State Graphics card. Now a lot of you will ask, “what exactly is a Solid State Graphics Card?”, which is a great question, let’s explain what this GPU can do.
Traditional GPUs have their own bank of memory, which in today’s GPUs is mostly GDDR5 DRAM. Gaming GPUs today have a maximum memory bank, or frame buffer, of around 8GB, which is enough for gaming but not enough for professional use.
With today’s lineup of AMD FirePro GPUs the largest frame buffer available is 32GB, which may seem like a lot but it is very limiting when it comes to analysing huge datasets. In the past, if you needed to use more memory than was in your GPUs frame buffer you would need to use your system memory, which adds a lot of latency and can slow performance down to a crawl, forcing AMD to look into an all new way to increase the available memory to the GPU without such a massive performance impact.
AMD has now released a new teaser for their Radeon Pro SSG, a GPU that is able to use a bank of solid state storage to give this GPU a 1TB frame buffer, which allows this GPU to scrub 4K or higher resolution video with relative ease.
State of the art content creation, scientific and engineering visualisation applications require the processing of big data sets, far larger than can be contained within the capacities of existing GPU memory. Current limitations require slices of data to be processed individually and later merged by software, and often incur significant latency for fetching additional data from system memory. These big data problems discourage developers in these domains from leveraging the advantages of the GPU. Radeon Pro SSG memory addresses the big data problem for GPUs, paving the way for improved performance and dramatically increased user productivity.
At this time, it is unknown whether or not this GPU will be using AMD’s new Vega GPU architecture, though it certainly seems like a great opportunity to utilise AMD’s new High Bandwidth Cache memory solution. Previous prototypes of AMD’s SSG concept were using Polaris 10 silicon, though it seems unlikely that AMD would release this new product using older silicon.
You can join the discussion on AMD’s new 1TB Radeon Pro SSG on the OC3D Forums.