We have already covered AMD’s new WX workstation graphics cards (AMD and Nvidia Compete in Video Stitching at Siggraph), revealed in late July, but one development that we missed was the announcement of the Pro SSG add-in board. This unusual graphics card incorporates an SSD and will be launched as a developer kit.
The Radeon Pro SSG will feature 1TB of Solid State Graphics. It is designed for very demanding graphics applications, such as real-time 8k video post-production and VR content creation. Work in these fields requires the processing of large datasets – much larger than can be contained in existing GPU memory. This means that data slices have to be worked on individually and merged by software later on. This is not the case with the Pro SSG, says AMD.
When information that is needed is not available in the GPU, standard memory architecture uses the GPU to send a request to the CPU; this then pulls the information from CPU memory or a hard drive, creating latency. AMD’s new GPU technology provides a 1TB dedicated frame buffer to support the GPU, enabling larger datasets to be loaded locally.
In a demonstration at Siggraph, 8k raw video timeline scrubbing was sped from 17fps to more than 90fps.
Developer kits are available now, for $10,000; full availability is planned for 2017.
