AMD Prepares To Ship Gaming SSDs 110
Lucas123 writes An AMD website in China has leaked information about the upcoming release of a line of SSDs aimed at gamers and professionals that will offer top sequential read/write speeds of 550MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively. AMD confirmed the upcoming news, but no pricing was available yet. The SSDs will come in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities and will use Toshiba's 19-nanometer flash lithography technology. According to IHS, AMD is likely entering the gaming SSD market because desktop SSD shipments are expected to experience a 39% CAGR between now and 2018.
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Wait, what?
I didn't RTFA, but judging from the title, wasn't this about SSDs and not about GPUs? Or do SSDs also have active cooling and large drivers now?
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It's all to do with the CAGR. In the face of a 39% CQGR AMD are facing a 62.3% CHRP next year, so need to offset that by developing a product line with at least a 22.5% QRPD.
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It is about SSD's, however the parent was playing fanboyism and the mods have their heads up their ass like usual and couldn't figure it out.
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You game will load 0.2 seconds faster than a standard SSD but you'll pay $150 more for it. Enjoy.
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You game will load 0.2 seconds faster than a standard SSD but you'll pay $150 more for it. Enjoy.
If the games I've bought recently are anything to go by, it won't load any faster, because it's already loaded all the useful stuff from disk by the time you get to the end of the unskippable videos advertising AMD GPUs and the Unreal engine.
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You game will load 0.2 seconds faster than a standard SSD but you'll pay $150 more for it. Enjoy.
If the games I've bought recently are anything to go by, it won't load any faster, because it's already loaded all the useful stuff from disk by the time you get to the end of the unskippable videos advertising AMD GPUs and the Unreal engine.
Simple, go into the game contents and delete the unskippable videos, the game will load even faster becasue it's not loading the videos and video player.
Works just fine even with Steam games.
What is the expected edge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unsurprisingly enough, Toshiba also sells SSDs with Toshiba flash and Indilinx controllers(the only surprising part is keeping the 'OCZ' brand to do so). Where does AMD come in? I assume they aren't hoping to lose money by doing this; but I am having some trouble figuring out how.
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Re: What is the expected edge? (Score:1)
Yo dawg. I heard you like AMD...
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For most gamers, a Crucial MX100 would most likely be a better purchase, or if you want something
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The market has certainly matured to the point where there are relatively cheap options that aren't a disaster or some JMicron mess that underperforms the HDD it replaced; bu
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Anyways, now that I had a good laugh for the day I can say that I wouldn't hit a dog in the ass with any SSD (or any SSD made with components) from OCZ. Their reliability is shit and until Toshiba can clean up OCZ's act I won't touch an SSD made by them with someone else's ten foot pole.
All I can figure (Score:2)
For gamers? (Score:2)
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Gamers spend more $$$
Re:For gamers? (Score:5, Funny)
A sticker with ultraviolet reflectance so the black lights in your case make it look right wicked and totally worth the extra $80 you paid for commodity hardware with F4tal1ty's name on it.
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The specs appear to be fairly normal high end for the current SSD market, but nothing exceptional.
You mean capped at the SATA bus speed. It's hard to make something significantly better than that without connecting the drive directly to a PCIe connector.
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I test drove one of these for a couple of months: http://www.violin-memory.com/p... [violin-memory.com]
It delivered way more than is advertised here and wasn't connected via PCIe. We're talking 2 GB/s BW and more than 250,000 IOPS with an average response time under 200 microseconds in my testing. It is kind of spendy and heavy as fuck.
Also I have a very large penis.
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Re:For gamers? (Score:4, Informative)
Female razors have the handle at a different angle (one more comfortable for legs and crotches vs faces).
I learned this when I thought they were the same and god lady ones on sale, definitely not as easy to use on a face as a man's razor.
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You're holding it wrong.
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Your post is completely false, yet in typical Slashdot fashion idiots modded you up.
There are different styles of razors for women - your standard razor is identical to a men's razor in basic design. It is used for arms, armpits, legs, crotch, neck, and face.
Then there are the larger razors, often with a large block of lubricant surrounding the blades. These have a different handle design and are made for legs.
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http://image.made-in-china.com... [made-in-china.com]
is angled less than
http://web.tradekorea.com/uplo... [tradekorea.com]
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http://image.made-in-china.com... [made-in-china.com]
is angled less than
http://web.tradekorea.com/uplo... [tradekorea.com]
LOL! Are you fucking serious? Your best example is a pair of 10 cent disposable pieces of shit that are nearly identical?
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Yes, the same brand disposables are at different angles of handle, which is exactly what I said the difference was.
The only time I've bought lady razors was when traveling and buying disposables, and it was absolutely noticeable the difference between the equivalent male and female versions.
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So what would be the difference between SSDs for gamers and those for non-gamers? The specs appear to be fairly normal high end for the current SSD market, but nothing exceptional. Maybe a sticker on it displaying a demon wielding an oversized SF gun?
Get a woman in non functional but revealing body armor or space suit and put it into production!
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Gaming? (Score:3)
Seems odd to call them "gaming SSDs" when they sound like just really fast SSDs. I'm actually surprised they are marketing them that way - especially since they'd reach a wider market if the didn't just target gamers.
Plus are games really that much faster? When I bought my Samsung 840 I put everything on there. However as soon as I found out that the load times in HL2 weren't noticeably different (probably because the longest part of the "please wait" wasn't disk access) I quickly shifted the entire "steamapps" folder to my HDD.
Re:Gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes. These are pretty much the same drives. At least the tech used is the same.
They are not targeting all gamers, just stupid gamers who think printing "for gamers" on the SSD somehow makes it worth more.
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AMD treating its customers like idiots? Say it ain't so! [archive.org]
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You forgot about the flames/demon/skull/half-naked-woman stickers.
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Those will be visible only if you connect the built-in UV LED to your fan controller.
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In other words, they're bring back OCZ.
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I have a Samsung 840 PRO with 256GB, it is noticeably faster for most games, specially at startup. But I could leave without it. I rarely fill out it completely and when I do I just remove some games I don't play anymore.
Re:Gaming? (Score:4, Informative)
They're not even really fast SSDs.
550MB/s is the limit of SATA3. Something we've hit with SSDs from last year. Yes, we hit the limit of SATA3 just after SATA3 stuff started coming on the market.
It's why Apple went PCIe with their SSDs (hitting 750MB/sec easy) - the bottleneck is no longer with the SSD or controller, it's the SATA interface.
It's really more of a name thing since there's zero advantage going AMD SSD over going with anyone else. A Samsung 840 Evo already maxes SATA3 and comes in up to 1TB capacities. (Hint: when you see or hear 530+ MB/sec, that's the limit of SATA talking).
It's almost pointless to measure these days - the last metric left is IOPS and that's at the point of diminishing returns when you're getting 20K, 40K IOPS.
Now, if AMD really wanted to make a splash, they'd use PCIe and make sure you can boot off of it.
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From value brand to peddler of overpriced rebrands (Score:2)
Trying to find a positive spin on this but.... no. Anyone?
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Overpriced devices sold to people who are not me may result in lower prices for me due to economy of scale.
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It's an SSD, the entire point is to not spin.
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Mod parent up.
Sure, 39% CAGR, but what about... (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, 39% CAGR, but what about the 390ppm ADGG on the CKOI? What does IHS think about that?
Sure, 39% CAGR, but what about... (Score:1)
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TBH and AFAIK, IDK if dohzer is AFK ATM or just AWOL. B4N and AWYR. BOL.
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Current SSDs already HAVE those speeds. So why bother?
It's actually pretty easy to get those same speeds using 5-8 spinning disks in a RAID stripe. Where SSDs really shine is in random reads and writes.
I use both on my desktop...a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO and five 2TB Western Digital Red (5400rpm) drives in RAID-5. Uncached reads and writes are about 400MB/sec on the array, and about 580MB/sec on the SSD. The two biggest differences are the SSD achieves those speeds at pretty much every block size of at least 4KB, while the disks need 64KB block sizes, and the S
SSD to rule the world. (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently added a 64gig SSD To a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18. yes a billion year old PATA laptop and it made an insane difference. Enough that the laptop was useable again for emergency services tasks. So instead of spending $4500 per truck again for new toughbooks, we are just upgrading all of the old laptops to SSD drives.
Dirt cheap too if you use mSATA and mSATA to PATA adapters.
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I updated an old Pentium II Thinkpad with a 512MB compactflash with an IDE adapter. It takes longer to power-up the laptop and go through the BIOS bootup sequence than to load Windows 98SE.
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Our local city government is doing the same thing with its entire fleet - police, fire, electricity, water/sewer, and trash. It's not that many units, perhaps 100 computers (we're a small city), but they're still saving $250K by "refreshing" instead of replacing.
Nothing makes a slow computer feel faster than an SSD upgrade.
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Damn, that's a good idea. I have a CF-27 running Gentoo or something, that I love to pieces but not really sure what to do with anymore. Thing used to be my daily laptop.
Top read / write speed are pointless for consumers (Score:2)
Since those are only reached at queue depths at 16, 32 or higher - which you'll never reach on a desktop machine.
What you want is a drive with high IOPS at queue depths of 1, 2 and 4, maybe 8 as well.
The higher the IOPS at the lowest queues, the more responsive your machine feels.
Toshi(t)ba / OCZ? (Score:2)
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE!
Sorry, NOT playing that game again.
Crappy product from a customer-hostile company?
Fuck that noise.
Maybe AMD will make a sound marketing choice based on sound engineering again. But I'm not going to volunteer to hold my breath.
No (Score:1)
AMD, come on. Focus on refreshing your top lineup of CPUs, or become irrelevant.
SATA bottleneck (Score:1)
Yawn. Plain vanilla SATA SSDs are a dime a dozen.
Wake me up when NVME enabled, 4 lane PCI express, M.2 or SATA Express SSDs become available.
SATA was designed for spinning rust drives and 6 gigabits (Along with encoding overhead) is a significant bottleneck
Even that's not enough. Even if your PCI express connected SSD is fast, most still present themselves as generic AHCI devices. That works, but was also designed for old hard drives that can realistically only read and write one thing at a time. Only one
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VOTE PARENT UP, it's the most insightful comment posted so far!
I came into this to see if anyone else noticed that these supposedly high end SSD drives are still using SATA 3.0 & an anon beat me to it.
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Compound Annual Growth Rate
great... (Score:2)
Same speed as everyone else (Score:2)
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Indeed.
99% of games have absolutely no performance issues on a Mac. They also take waaaay less space in a Mac's SSD. And they are also way cheaper.
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Do you know why it's cheaper to play games on Mac? Because there's only a tiny fraction of computer games available for it.
Posted from my Mac mini.
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That depends ENTIRELY on what game. SWTOR is highly dependant on the HD. Loading into fleet on a normal HD can take a few minutes. Use a SSD, and it takes 30s. And CPU barely registers a blip until you actually fully get into the game.
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What games did they test? I've certainly seen games where a SSD made a BIG difference to loading times (roller coaster tycoon 3 springs to mind)
If the game just wants to load a big block of predetermined data from a sequential set of locations in a data file then HDD is fine, the problem comes when due to either lack of optimisation or the open/flexible nature of the game it needs to load lots of small peices in a non-sequential manner than a SSD makes a big difference.
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I've certainly seen games where a SSD made a BIG difference to loading times (roller coaster tycoon 3 springs to mind)
RCT3 takes about 10 seconds to start up on mine, and about 10 seconds to load a level. After that, it does everything on the fly. You'll load a level once every few hours or so (10000 seconds), so an SSD would result in a performance increase of about 0.1% on my system.
I run a couple of cheap stock 7200rpm hard drives striped, so a bit faster than most.
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