During its Capsaicin event, which took place at Siggraph 2016, AMD a new solution for the graphics solution for the professional market. Based on the Polaris 10 architecture the Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics (SSG) features onboard flash memory to extend the onboard memory.

When processing genome sequencing, 8K video material, three dimensional real-time image editing or serach for oil or natural gas there cannot be enough computing power. One of the worst things to actually happen while such intense tasks are performed is that the graphics card runs out of memory and the data being processed is going to be swapped into the system memory, an SSD or even an HDD. This would add a lot of latency to the editing process and therefore slow it down significantly.

Todays professional graphics cards are available with up to 32 Gigabyte of VRAM, but the afore mentioned tasks are capable of allocating even more memory. AMD is now offering a new solution, which integrates the additional solid state memory direclty on the graphics card. The flash memory is connected to the graphics chip using a PCI Express 3.0 link and data can be shifted from and to the GPU without having to reroute it through operating system and CPU. For this purpose the PCB of this particular graphics card features two M.2 slots, which means it will be easy to upgrade in future.

During their demo AMD compared the new card to a $10'000 US system, showing that the system equipped with the new Radeon Pro SSG was up to eight times faster. Unfortunately it wasn't mentioned what hardware was used for that setup. The $10k setup was capable of processing 8k video at 17 frames per second while the AMD Radeon Pro SSG powered setup managed 92 frames per second.

So far the Radeon Pro SSG is still in development and only available to selcet partners, which will have to apply for the project. Apart from that one developer kit will cost $9'999 US, which isn't precisely what one might call a bargain.






Source: AMD