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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:41 pm

tfp wrote:
The changes they are doing are not a revolution for disk access and are no different then building an pretty standard desktop PC today.


https://www.pcworld.com/article/3532811 ... ndows.html

https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/18/play ... sd-memory/

Microsoft and especially Sony will disagree.
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:43 pm

tfp wrote:
I'm talking about the hardware on a RAID card. It pretty much does what you are talking about but with ram.


Never heard that before. JBI, care to shed light on this?
 
just brew it!
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:47 pm

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
tfp wrote:
I'm talking about the hardware on a RAID card. It pretty much does what you are talking about but with ram.

Never heard that before. JBI, care to shed light on this?

High-end RAID controllers have on-board RAM (frequently with an integrated battery backup) that is used as a local cache.
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:54 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Igor_Kavinski wrote:
tfp wrote:
I'm talking about the hardware on a RAID card. It pretty much does what you are talking about but with ram.

Never heard that before. JBI, care to shed light on this?

High-end RAID controllers have on-board RAM (frequently with an integrated battery backup) that is used as a local cache.


I doubt that would improve performance better than Optane cache.
 
just brew it!
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:56 pm

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
High-end RAID controllers have on-board RAM (frequently with an integrated battery backup) that is used as a local cache.

I doubt that would improve performance better than Optane cache.

What makes you think Optane would be faster than RAM?

Regardless, neither is going to make a difference that is worth the money for your use case.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 1:03 pm

just brew it! wrote:
What makes you think Optane would be faster than RAM?


Capacity. I don't think a hardware RAID card would have 16GB RAM cache on it, unless it was very, very expensive.
 
Waco
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 2:48 pm

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
Capacity. I don't think a hardware RAID card would have 16GB RAM cache on it, unless it was very, very expensive.

No, because the cache is usually used for caching writes, it is usually a few GB.

Now, that said...your OS already does this. RAM is many orders of magnitude faster than Optane in latency and bandwidth and your OS already uses it for I/O acceleration.
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 3:21 pm

Waco wrote:
Now, that said...your OS already does this. RAM is many orders of magnitude faster than Optane in latency and bandwidth and your OS already uses it for I/O acceleration.


MMMMM ACKSUALLY I noticed that $OPERATING_SYSTEM was stealing all my RAM to temporarily store all my worthless files that I was using.

Ick. Yuck.

I promptly got some random patches on the internet, modified a few configuration files I don't understand, etc...

Now my computer doesn't boot, but if it did, I'm confident it would run, much, much better with 90% of RAM free, absolutely free, doing-literally-nothing, as is right & proper.
 
tfp
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 3:36 pm

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
tfp wrote:
The changes they are doing are not a revolution for disk access and are no different then building an pretty standard desktop PC today.


https://www.pcworld.com/article/3532811 ... ndows.html

https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/18/play ... sd-memory/

Microsoft and especially Sony will disagree.


Did you bother to read these?

pcworld wrote:
The NVMe interface, which connects directly to the PCI Express bus, will be used to minimize latency.

My 2 year old desktop has a NVMe interface, it's the M.2 connector. Now it's not what I would call hot pluggable I don't really need that nor do I want another priority disk interface. Also this has been done before with a number of interfaces in the past.

pcworld wrote:
The SSD and the DirectStorage API will be two of the four parts within the Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture, which also includes a dedicated hardware decompression block, and what Microsoft calls Sampler Feedback Streaming.

This is software, compression is not a new technology either. That said loading a game doesn't take 16 cores so they might as well save drive bandwidth and space with compression. I hope they release it to PC so that people that create PC games can use it. That said games have compressed data on PC for a number of years now and a common API is awesome if good.

VB wrote:
On his explorations with more than 100 game developers, the main request was to add solid state drive (SSD) memory, which is faster than a hard disk drive in delivering data for games. Those hard drives were valuable in a way, as they made feeding data from Blu-ray disk drives possible, but developers were banging up against the limits of the hard drive.

“To me, the SSD is a game-changer,” Cerny said.

It takes 2 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds to load data from a hard disk, at 50MBs to 100MBs a second in terms of fetching the data from either the center or the edge of a hard drive. Two-thirds of the time is spent locating the right game data, and a third of the time is spent loading it. So 20 seconds has been the norm for big transitions.


Hey you know what he's right. You know what else, this applies to any PC over the last number of YEARS when people switched to a harddrive. Trying Googlings for people upgrading existing systems with an SSD both PCs and Xbox/PS4.

VB wrote:
So Sony added 12-channels for the flash interface. That helps speed up the flash, but flash isn’t cheap as a form of memory. Sony had to balance the cost, so that it could keep the price of the console down. Sony focused on a flash size of 825GBs, connecting at a speed of 5.5 GB/second.

Read flash controller that is outside of the CPU/south bridge. Not new tech at all but maybe a good idea... I am sure they are using an off the shelf chip with at most some customization from some manufacture just like the rest of the system.

VB wrote:
Rad Game Tools created Kraken, with 10% better decompression performance for data. It was used on the PS4 and it was popular for later games in the PS4 generation. The custom decompressor for Kraken is in the main custom chip (which has both an AMD CPU and AMD Radeon RDNA 2 chip, and there is a DMA controller, two I/O processors, and on-chip RAM, on the SSD chip. It links to system memory and to the custom flash controller.

Again external flash controller to off old some of the processing from the chip and take advantage of the other IO ports they are using. That said any PCIe card that is adding M.2 or SATA slots has it's own SD controller that is in HW and could have had RAM on it.


While these articles are fun they are super basic and frankly I don't understand how you are so amazed.
 
tfp
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Mon Mar 23, 2020 3:43 pm

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
What makes you think Optane would be faster than RAM?


Capacity. I don't think a hardware RAID card would have 16GB RAM cache on it, unless it was very, very expensive.


I found one with 2GB of DDR3 without much effort, the question is does 16GB of RAM matter? Also how much is 16GB of ram, not very, very expensive but also probably not very,very useful on a controller.

At the enterprise level I did see a controller the would support 1 TB of SSD to cache HDD. Again different use case and cost point.
 
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Re: Extreme Game Accelerator AIC - An idea

Sun Dec 19, 2021 3:40 pm

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