AMD Tech Day at CES: 2018 Roadmap Revealed, with Ryzen APUs, Zen+ on 12nm, Vega on 7nm
by Ian Cutress on February 1, 2018 8:45 AM ESTOver the years we have seen various attempts from AMD and Intel to try and help improve storage performance on their mainstream platforms. Because of the solid user experience benefits that solid state storage can bring, these attempts come in two forms: to make the most of a small amount of super-fast storage, or to expand the amount of super-fast storage available. Most attempts at this have been laborious, such as Intel’s caching technology that allows a SSD or 32GB of Optane Memory to act as a quick read/write cache for a rotational drive.
AMD’s latest attempt to boost the storage performance is Enmotus FuzeDrive, a collaborative piece of software that is designed to combine several storage devices into one big disk. The principle is fairly simple: take any combination of rotational hard drive, SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, and even DRAM, and this software will create a single drive that addresses them all. The software and drivers will manage what data goes where for quicker access, rather than it appearing as one big JBOD.
The obvious red flags from the press were about DRAM, which we were told will only act as a read-cache from prepared data taken from the other drives. The other flag was about if one drive in that system fails, whether all the data is lost. The answer was a likely yes, and so the risk of such a system might be in-line with a JBOD array or similar to a RAID-0, but without the predictable speedup a RAID-0 array might bring.
Predictive caching technologies to help speed up read/write access times are, on paper, a good idea. Some SSDs already do this, by having a small amount of fast SLC cache to act as a write buffer, which the controller can then move the data around to empty the cache when the drive is idle. The difference between having something like a controller manage an embedded system and a general software package in play is that the embedded system has to work for a single drive, albeit millions of units. That arrangement is going to be as defined and engineered as much as that SSD vendor wants it to be. For a software package, it has to work across a variety of environments that might be badly configured, or in situations that the software might not be able to identify properly. As the software stretches over three or four different drives, it sounds like a potential failure in the making of one of those drives decides to die.
AMD lists several benefits of FuzeDrive: no Windows reinstall required, drives can be added to the pool at any point, or removed from the pool if sufficient spare space exists. Pools with DRAM added can be configured manually if some more DRAM is needed. AMD lists that in its testing, comparing a 500 GB hard-drive to a system with a Samsung 960 Pro added to the pool, they recorded a 578% faster Adobe Premiere launch, and a 931% faster Adobe Photoshop launch.
I could see FuzeDrive being useful in two particular scenarios: If a user as a small (32-128 GB) NVMe drive and a 1TB SSD/HDD, a single pool can be made. Users with a single large drive (SATA or HDD) could use the software to add DRAM, enabling an automatic RAM disk.
Enmotus FuzeDrive will be available for Ryzen Desktop systems, and will cost $20.
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Byte - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
The current references to upcoming zen are confusing as hell. There is Zen+ 2nd Generation and then Zen 2 coming out. Should leave out "2nd Gen" alltogether.neblogai - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
To fix mistakes in some tables:table on page 2: L3 cache should probably say simply '4MB' for all RR parts.
first table on page 3- two G-series OPNs have C4 (15W) written in their codes. They should be YD2200C5M4MFB + YD2200C5FBBOX and YD2400C5FBBOX + YD2400C5M4MFB, http://products.amd.com/en-us/compare?prod1=148&am...
And I still hope 209.78 mm2 die size for 2200U is wrong- and it is Banded Kestrel die. Or at least that BK will be coming to work as 2200U later.
Dragonstongue - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
I do not see a 39dba being anywhere close to "silent" this is above many others truth be told, if they went with a larger fan probably could have dropped Dba levels down, or if they use fancier blades to reduce air noise, something along that line.But yes, wraith max being priced at $60 is/was insane, I would say would be "fair" to be no more than $40. seeing as so many others are available in this price range that are at least as good if not superior, yes RGB adds some to price, but, the dimensions of the cooler and lack of thermal mass also means it will not cool as well or require a much louder fan/pressure to be "equivalent"
Shame no Vega or RX on 12nm (14nm+) pretty much no where that I can see (Canada) has any RX anything, they have Vega sure, but WAY above MSRP/MSEP, greed of sellers, greed of the makers drives price up and up, just means those who want a "gaming card" end up paying through the nose for it.
Nice to see AMD focus some attention on the ram overclock side of the equation, so one can use baseline higher memory speed or overclock or both to get that much more performance.
All in all, IMO AMD have really pushed forward to being far behind the pack (just barely staying alive) to in many ways being substantially better value and performance for $ spent (cpu/motherboard wise) and at least being competitive gpu wise (no they are not always, but have always been since Radeon 1900 days, sometimes more power more performance, sometimes power limited so not as much performance, cannot win every race, but, being able to "show up" is still very important, unlike say Matrox or Via who CANNOT even race the same race these days)
Sure wish their stock price was showing faith from investors/brokers, from bleeding money to pulling themselves out of the grave in less than 2 years against anything but easy competition says a lot, or at least it should be ^.^
mode_13h - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
GCN (Graphics Core Next) is one of the dumber architecture names out there. I sure hope it doesn't get succeeded by something we end up having to call "Next-Gen".WatcherCK - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
I wish AMD would release an uber APU (hmm just like Intel are doing) with a base performance of say solid 60 fps at 1440p for around 95W or less? I could get this APU and a board ram and a drive for a little more than what a discrete GPU is going for and in theory miners wont want them so they should be in stock for those that want to game...mode_13h - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
An APU that powerful would probably attract miners.Also, memory bandwidth is going to be a problem. To achieve that level of performance, the consoles had to use GDDR5. Intel had the right idea of giving the AMD GPU its own stack of HBM2.
phillock - Saturday, February 3, 2018 - link
Thanks to amd, intel drops its prices :)nikon133 - Sunday, February 11, 2018 - link
These new Ryzen APUs could make nice base for next-gen consoles... with some modifications... but then, console APUs are already custom solutions, so that should not be impossible.8 proper Ryzen cores running at over 3GHz and matching up-to-date GPU with sufficient number of CUs... would make quite powerful console at its core. Balanced one, too... it is hardly a secret that current consoles are under-powered on CPU side. Maybe Jaguar cores were necessity for this gen to keep price down, but next gen should be equipped at least with 8x Ryzen 3 cores?
mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
I think jaguar cores are much smaller than Ryzen cores. So, you'd probably be looking at 4 core/8 thread Ryzen APU - not 8 cores.Anyway, these APUs have much weaker iGPUs and much less memory bandwidth than current-gen consoles (excluding Nintendo).
mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
BTW, I'm sure XBox One X kept Jaguar simply because Ryzen wasn't yet ready. There's a very long lead time for this silicon.Also, it seems Jaguar's 28 mm cores are only 3.1 mm^2 per core, whereas Ryzen's 14 nm cores are 44 mm^2 (which sounds like it also includes cache). So, it seems pretty unrealistic to expect consoles will just drop in 8 Ryzen cores where they previously had 8 Jaguars.