Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why does this GPU have an SSD? – AMD Radeon Pro SSG”.
That is fast. This GPU has four nvme ssds on it. It’S a trick that AMD pulled to make the PCI Express slot go a little further than it usually does meet the Radeon Pro SSG, the world’s first graphics card with storage. But this came out five years ago and it’s still the only graphics card with storage, so how the heck does it work, and why didn’t this take off? First I’ll take off to talk about our sponsor smart, deploy, zero touch, zero headache, PC management for it, deploy Windows, images, apps and drivers from the cloud no VPN required get your free subscription worth over five hundred dollars at smartdeploy.com Linus foreign on the surface, the Radeon Pro SSG is nothing special, basically a Vega 64 with double the hbm2 memory. But if we take off the cooler we can get a look at its real party trick. Look at that GPU business in the front SSD party in the back. These guys are literally 2280 m.2 nvme ssds Samsung OEM, each is 512 gigs and each shows up separately in Windows.
Although the default setup is a Windows Dynamic, disk stripe, which is effectively a two terabyte raid zero. So it’s super cool but uh. What will we use? It for sequential and random rights are far beyond even our PCI Express Gen 4 SSD, thanks to the 16 Lanes of PCI Express bandwidth available to the storage, even though I can only use gen, 3 speeds, but only sequential reads, scale. This way and random reads are far slower than our Gen 4 SSD. My best guess for. Why is that, unless there’s something wrong with the ssds on the card, read operations might Simply Be redirecting through the GPU itself, which is increasing, request, latency and therefore reducing throughput.
For random, but not for sequential reads, testing latency with performance tests lends credibility to that assumption, but hey since the data is going through the GPU anyway. This kind of reminds me of Microsoft’s direct storage API, which enables an nvme SSD to load data directly to the GPU instead of going through the CPU first now will we see a performance Improvement? Then if we run games straight off of the SSG, let’s give it a shot. I’Ve got F1 2021 installed on both the internal SSD and the SSG itself. So we’ll see now, if there’s any Improvement whatsoever, give me a sec. I got ta, we got an ethernet cable, [ Applause ], as it turns out date. He is still processed by the CPU unless it’s using amd’s SSG API, so we’re in fact losing some performance due to the SSD array and GPU sharing bandwidth. What a missed opportunity as for the API itself? Well, maybe we can test that out when the SSG first launched AMD touted its ability to work with massive data sets and well yeah. Two terabytes is massive, but unfortunately for AMD massive data sets that benefit from a direct connection to the GPU like this are not super common.
The example they came up with was running 8K raw footage in real time off of the ssg’s internal storage and they helpfully created a sample video player to handle exactly that. It requires processing the video files with ffmpeg first to decompress the raw video frames. So we’ll do that now open the terminal here, I’ve already converted the files and yes yeah. What okay? Let’S try directly off of the SSG.
I’Ve tried everything I can think of at this point from running the player itself off of the SSG storage to compiling it myself same thing always happens, looks like something changed between the time they wrote it and today – and this whole thing is just broken now, seeing As the original SDK was already tough to find, let alone find an updated version, you can guess it wasn’t too popular. Unlike our brand new cable ties at ltdstore.com check this out, we’ve got 15 new colors. There is one Ray of Hope For Us.
Adobe added support for it in Premiere Pro back in 2018 and as far as I can tell they’re the only ones, so let’s run Puget bench’s 8K red test and see what we get all right. So this is straight off of the SSD. I’M just gon na run the live playback 8K, and this will take a few minutes.
Oh Adobe, why are you so slow success? Look at that. Playback is six to nearly 69 times nicer than running from our Gen 4 SSD, and all I did was copy files to the SSG mind you. It’S still not full speed, we’re looking at less than 10 FPS at full AK res and less than seven at half res, but that’s way better than the less than one FPS we got before it freaking works.
But why did AMD think to do something like this? In the first place, the Radeon Pro SSG is a solution to a uniquely 2017 problem. Nvidia had the quadro p6000, a GPU with 24 gigs of gddr5x memory AMD wanted to make a card with even more memory to compete, but dram prices were going through the roof. At the time and vram prices weren’t far behind their then New Vegas 64 graphics cards launched in August, bringing with them eight gigabytes of hbm2 memory.
So you might think well how about just expanding that? Well, that’s tough, because hpm2 is connected via ridiculously wide 2048-bit memory. Bus, so not only is it very expensive per gigabyte, it’s also very difficult to scale it without making the Silicon itself much larger to accommodate the extra direct connections to the GPU enter solid state Graphics, nand, Flash the stuff that ssds are made of may not be Nearly as fast but it’s pretty affordable compared to vram, with Radeon SSG AMD, now had a whole two terabytes of memory to work with your move-invidia or actually our move, and they even have standard phillips screws. Although they’re not ferrous, I can’t pick it up with a magnetic tip. Oh well, yeah.
It just comes right out and a new one goes right on in now. This is tricky because it doesn’t have a magnetic properties, but in it goes all right. One down three to go there, we’re done this is hilarious. You could totally run your system without any additional storage as long as you’re, okay, with the overhead of sharing bandwidth with a GPU. That’S not its intended purpose. Of course, putting the ssds so close to the GPU means that, like with Microsoft’s direct storage API, it doesn’t have to go through the CPU or really any other part of the system. If it’s loading via the API straight to the GPU, get subscribed by the way, because the minute Microsoft gives us something to test direct storage with, we are on it. This Arrangement tremendously speeds up access times, which is a crucial component to anything a GPU does, which is why it’s such a Hot Topic today, even the high bandwidth cache controller AMD included on the Vega gpus that allows them to extend vram with main system memory is Slow since it has to go through the CPU first, as we’ve seen, the SSG concept is sound, but only in a world where that much memory is necessary only in a world where people are willing to use the API and most unfortunately, for AMD in 2017.
Only in a world where people work in AK raw and are not using lower resolution proxy Clips, especially considering it was rocking Vega 64 specs, alongside an asking price of seven thousand dollars when it was new, although it quickly fell to 4 600 a few months after Release because it’s such a niche within a niche within a niche use case, I haven’t been able to find any examples of it being used in the real world. But let’s say demand for this feature does come back well, the promise of direct storage. Doing basically the same thing makes this Arrangement costly and inefficient.
I mean there’s no reason: DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Creative Cloud couldn’t use direct storage if games can to its credit, you’re getting a lot of m.2 slots and a GPU all in one package. But the bridge chip and controller Hardware do not come cheap and you’re. Giving up bandwidth whenever the SSD is accessed by something that’s not using the API.
The Radeon Pro SSG is truly a product of its time and I doubt we’ll see such a beast again anytime soon, but I know we’ll see more of our sponsor vesi thanks to Bessie Footwear for sponsoring today’s video vessi Footwear is known for being lightweight easy to Pack, comfortable and, most importantly, waterproof designed to keep you moving vessi released their new everyday move. Shoes with enhanced, breathability and added support. Their style is perfect for The Adventurous or those looking for something sportier featuring a pull tab to take them off and put them back on with ease vegan, suede lace, cages, extra midsole, cushioning and the same waterproof diamondtex technology.
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Our recent video on the Nvidia a100 for another example of a high-end piece of kit that has questionable practicality. It’S a good one. .