AMD Radeon Pro SSG Could Support 4TB Memory

[Carlosan]

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In a move that was perhaps the most important announcement of Siggraph, Radeon Technologies Group presented the Radeon Pro SSG card, perhaps the most innovative concept to have come out of the GPU world of in quite some time.

SSG stands for “Solid State Graphics”, and in its prototype version consists out of a Polaris 10 graphics processor, commonly known as Radeon RX 480 with 8GB of memory, a PLX PCIe bridge and two M.2 NVMe slots with two 512GB SSD drives, which might come to market on their own, probably branded as Radeon R9 memory.

The way how Radeon Pro SSG works is quite ingenious. When AMD decided to reshape its mainstream GPU codenamed as “Ellesmere” into a “Polaris 10”, part of that effort was to bring more than 16 PCIe lanes inside the GPU. Polaris 10 has as much PCIe lanes as Intel mainstream processors – from Haswell, Broadwell of yesterday to today’s Skylake and tomorrow’s Kabylake. In our conversation with John Swinimer and his colleague, we learned that the initial prototype card is just the beginning. The GPU attaches to the on-board PCIe bridge just like Radeon Pro Duo does. However, the data does not go down to the motherboard but rather stays on the discrete board, ‘talking’ to the NVMe controller which features two M.2 slots.

 

[Carlosan]

How the Radeon Pro SSG Works - The Basics

We recently had a chance to speak with AMD's Robert Jameson about the Radeon Pro SSG, or “solid-state graphics,” that was announced earlier this week. This isn't a technical deep-dive by any means, but we did get some additional top-level information as to how the Radeon Pro SSG works. As a reminder, the SSG is targeted at professional production users and is not a gaming card; that said, the technology is interesting and new, and worth exploring for potential future implications.

Here's a quick run down of how this thing works.

The Radeon Pro SSG runs a last-generation GPU, so it's actually not on Polaris – only the new WX 7100, 5100, and 4100 are on Polaris – and hosts its solid-state storage on the card. The SSG is a PCI-e video card of the usual design: There's a GPU, on-card memory, and a cooler. Also included on the card is a 1TB extended framebuffer, created out of solid-state storage. The SSD, or what AMD is calling Solid-State Graphics, has 8x PCI-e lanes allocated to it of the 16 total available to the card, with the remaining 8 going to the normal GPU functions.

[Carlosan]

State of the art content creation, scientific and engineering visualization applications require the processing of big datasets, 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.

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