AMD Unveils Radeon Solid State Storage Architecture And 1TB Radeon Pro SSG For Massive Pro Graphics Datasets

At AMD's latest Capsaicin event, happening right now at the Hilton Anaheim, adjacent to SIGGRAPH, the company just made a handful of major announcements. AMD just revealed a brand-new line-up of Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX series professional graphics cards and that it was not only launching Radeon ProRender (formerly previewed as AMD FireRender), but also making it open source, as part of the GPUOpen initiative. The unveiling of its upcoming AMD Radeon Solid State Graphics Technology and the Radeon Pro SSG, however, could have a major impact on workflows for content creators that manage massive data sets.

We don’t have many deep, technical details of AMD’s Radeon Solid State Graphics Technology just yet, but what we do know is very interesting. AMD is essentially outfitting Radeon Pro SSG cards with relatively large amounts of Solid State Flash Memory, which can allow much larger data sets to reside close to the GPU in an extended frame buffer.

Whereas the highest-end professional graphics cards today may have up to 24GB of memory, the Radeon Pro SSG will start with 1TB, linked to the GPU via a custom PCI Express interface. As it stands today, GPUs have to carve up large data sets that exceed the capacity of local memory and work on them in chunks. The data is then shuffled to and from system memory – or worse, the storage subsystem -- which craters performance. Giving the GPU access to a large, local data repository should offer significantly increased performance for demanding workloads like real-time post-production of 8K video, high-resolution rendering, VR content creation, and many others.

“One of the most challenging constraints faced by GPU computing applications is the inability to access terabytes of data,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “Radeon Pro SSG is poised to not only speed-up processing for many applications with very large datasets, but also to enable new application experiences by utilizing data persistence of non-volatile memory. This will be a disruptive advancement for many graphics and compute applications.”

During a demonstration of its upcoming Radeon Pro SSG solution, AMD showed 8K raw video timeline scrubbing that was accelerated from 17 frames per second on a traditional graphics setup to a to 90+ frames per second, which was a 5.3x uplift.

AMD is accepting applications for Radeon Pro SSG developer kits now and full availability is planned for some time in 2017. More information and an application for a developer kit, should be available on the Radeon website soon.