- 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?
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(upbeat music)
On the surface, the Radeon Pro SSG is nothing special,
basically a Vega 64 with doubled HBM2 memory.
But if we take off the cooler,
we can get a look at its real party trick.
(chuckles) 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 disc stripe
which is a effectively two terabyte RAID 0.
So it's super cool, but what would 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 it 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 to 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 gotta (indistinct) an ethernet cable.
As it turns out, data loaded from the SSG
is still a processed by the CPU
unless it's using AMDs 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
in poly 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,
What?
Okay.
Let's try directly off of the SSG.
Hmm, 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.
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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 benches 8K red tests
and see what we get.
All right, so this is straight off of the SSD.
I'm just gonna 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 8K 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 the 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 Vega 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 HBM2 is connected
via a 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 silicone can itself much larger
to accommodate the extra direct connections to the GPU.
Enter solid state graphics, Nan Flash,
the stuff that SDS 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-in video or actually our move.
(chuckles)
And they even have standard Phillips screws.
Although they're not Ferris,
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.
This is tricky
because it doesn't have any magnetic properties
but then 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 time
which is a crucial component to anything a GPU does
which is why it's such a hot topic today.
Even the high bandwidth cash controller,
AMD included on the Vega GPUs
that allows them to extend VRAM with main memory is slow
since it has to go through the CPU first.
As we've seen, the SG 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 8K raw
and are not using lower resolution proxy clips
especially considering it was rocking Vega 64 specs
alongside an asking price of $7,000 when it was new.
Although it quickly felt a 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
and you're giving up bandwidth whenever the SSD is accessed
and you're giving up bandwidth whenever the SD is accessed
by something that's not used in 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,
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Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out a recent video on the NVIDIA A100
for another example of a high end piece of kit
that has some questionable practicality.
It's a good one.