A resourceful user was able to turn the tiny 3D cache memory built by AMD in its latest consumer processors into a secondary, albeit puny storage unit....
Not OP and unsure of which specific SSD they are referring to but it could be that PCIE is both a data transfer standard and a physical connection on your computer. Saying “PCIE 5 PCIE SSD” would specify that it both uses PCIE 5 data transmission protocols as well as the physical PCIE slot.
Simply saying “PCIE 5 SSD” could leave some ambiguity as to whether the SSD is installed in a PCIE slot or an M.2 slot, with the latter being more common but also being less powerful (although still more than enough for the average user). Simply saying “PCIE SSD” is even less clear as it could be any PCIE specification in either a PCIE or M.2 slot. Not relevant for this specific question, but saying just “M.2 SSD” would be very unclear as well as you know the physical slot it will go in, but you now open the door for it to use the SATA transmission standard which will bottleneck modern SSDs.
But how does it compare to a RAM disk using “regular” RAM?
Because RAM disks are nothing new. ImDisk is a free and opensource software that lets you easily setup a RAM disk.
I use it when running AI upscaling + frame interpolation programs, as they generate tons of temp files which take up many GBs of space. A RAM disk is not only faster but it prevents battering your SSDs with tons of writes.
If that’s the same article I’ve read a few days back, it also says that’s not entirely true, because maximum speed of that cache is 2 TB/s (you wrote 0.182 TB/s). I think it’s limited by the size, similarly to when you can’t achieve max speed during running due to insufficient road length. Or maybe it’s limited by the sampling rate.
it’s in this article as well "… AMD’s 3D V-Cache can be even faster when used for its intended purpose. First-generation 3D V-Cache is good enough for a 2 TB/s peak throughput, AMD states, while data bandwidth is even higher (2.5 TB/s) on the second-generation variant of the technology…
even losing 90% of it’s peak throughput is still good for .182TB/s and while the peak numbers came up using a 16/32MB dataset on a 96 MB drive , the tech was still able to pull a READ of 111k MB/sec and WRITE of 50k using an 8GB dataset on the same 96MB partition - the author called the results ’ puzzling ’
(answered twice because reddit automod removed first post for linking to twitter where the results were posted. if you want to see it, twit handle is GPUsAreMagic)
I mean, for consumers PCIE 4.0 M.2 drives already load pretty much everything so fast, that getting these speeds times 10 won’t make a whole lot of difference to an average gamer, for example.
But for professional use, this is Huge.
one will be recording and editing raw cinema quality footage at qualities like 12k (and higher if they even bother inventing that - there’s not really a noticeable improvement in quality past 8k unless you’re zooming in - and that’s assuming you even manage to find a screen that can put something that high quality up)
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can only partially be done in parallel, but each simulation step requires predictor/error regularization which is a serial aggregate step. This step is the bottle neck when you try to check if everything in the total simulation adds up correctly, the memory requirement isn’t huge, but it has to happen quickly and all in one place.
READ 182,923 MB/sec / WRITE 175,260.
saved you a click
The fastest PCIE 5.0 PCIE NVME SSD drives currently run around 12,500 /11,800 read/write so call it an order of magnitude faster (10x) + 50%.
They used OSFmount to create the ramdrives.
I’m curious, why is PCIE listed twice? Is it bc you’re saying it’s pcie and also it’s v5 of pcie? Eli15
Not OP and unsure of which specific SSD they are referring to but it could be that PCIE is both a data transfer standard and a physical connection on your computer. Saying “PCIE 5 PCIE SSD” would specify that it both uses PCIE 5 data transmission protocols as well as the physical PCIE slot.
Simply saying “PCIE 5 SSD” could leave some ambiguity as to whether the SSD is installed in a PCIE slot or an M.2 slot, with the latter being more common but also being less powerful (although still more than enough for the average user). Simply saying “PCIE SSD” is even less clear as it could be any PCIE specification in either a PCIE or M.2 slot. Not relevant for this specific question, but saying just “M.2 SSD” would be very unclear as well as you know the physical slot it will go in, but you now open the door for it to use the SATA transmission standard which will bottleneck modern SSDs.
I’ll be right back, I have to go to the ATM Machine.
But how does it compare to a RAM disk using “regular” RAM?
Because RAM disks are nothing new. ImDisk is a free and opensource software that lets you easily setup a RAM disk.
I use it when running AI upscaling + frame interpolation programs, as they generate tons of temp files which take up many GBs of space. A RAM disk is not only faster but it prevents battering your SSDs with tons of writes.
If that’s the same article I’ve read a few days back, it also says that’s not entirely true, because maximum speed of that cache is 2 TB/s (you wrote 0.182 TB/s). I think it’s limited by the size, similarly to when you can’t achieve max speed during running due to insufficient road length. Or maybe it’s limited by the sampling rate.
it’s in this article as well "… AMD’s 3D V-Cache can be even faster when used for its intended purpose. First-generation 3D V-Cache is good enough for a 2 TB/s peak throughput, AMD states, while data bandwidth is even higher (2.5 TB/s) on the second-generation variant of the technology…
even losing 90% of it’s peak throughput is still good for .182TB/s and while the peak numbers came up using a 16/32MB dataset on a 96 MB drive , the tech was still able to pull a READ of 111k MB/sec and WRITE of 50k using an 8GB dataset on the same 96MB partition - the author called the results ’ puzzling ’
(answered twice because reddit automod removed first post for linking to twitter where the results were posted. if you want to see it, twit handle is GPUsAreMagic)
Damn son
Holy crap. That’s insane.
I mean, for consumers PCIE 4.0 M.2 drives already load pretty much everything so fast, that getting these speeds times 10 won’t make a whole lot of difference to an average gamer, for example. But for professional use, this is Huge.
What are you guys on about? The thing with the perfect balance in between is just ram. Am I missing something here?
What kind of professional use though? The cache is only so big.
one will be recording and editing raw cinema quality footage at qualities like 12k (and higher if they even bother inventing that - there’s not really a noticeable improvement in quality past 8k unless you’re zooming in - and that’s assuming you even manage to find a screen that can put something that high quality up)
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can only partially be done in parallel, but each simulation step requires predictor/error regularization which is a serial aggregate step. This step is the bottle neck when you try to check if everything in the total simulation adds up correctly, the memory requirement isn’t huge, but it has to happen quickly and all in one place.
You can get similar speeds with PrimoCache
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/zxviqq/apparently_primocache_works_pretty_well/j22iytd/