Thursday, October 11th 2012
AMD Radeon RAMDisk Pitched as Trial
AMD's Radeon RAMDisk software, launched along with its desktop A-Series "Trinity" APUs, is being pitched to consumers as a trial software. A combination of A-Series "Trinity" APUs and AMD-certified memory lets you use the software to create a RAMDisk which works in conjuction with the primary HDD/SSD much in the same way as Intel Smart Response tech or NVELO Dataplex, it's just that the cache SSD is replaced by the system memory, an infinitely faster and more durable caching medium. The software juggles data from the primary drive to the RAMDisk based on its heat (frequency of access). Used with DDR3-1600 MHz memory, users could see data access speeds of up to 25.6 GB/s (gigabytes per second), a 1,700-times speedup over conventional HDD. When off the trial, a license to use the software can be bought for $19.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
45 Comments on AMD Radeon RAMDisk Pitched as Trial
This is actually Dataram RAMDisk, BTW.
But only when using an Intel CPU. AMD's memory controllers are so slow you'd only get 40% of that. Not even taking account software RAMD inefficiency - users will end up with 2-4GB/s.
essentially you are wasting some main memory, but given current ram pricing, users have done worse things with their money
I actually have 1GB dedicated to RAMdisk for browser cache. Not becuase it will be somewhat faster than my SSD by it is a kind of memory that gets used very often and i don't wat my SSD to load it each time
Btw: www.radeonramdisk.com/
It looks like it will work similar to disk cache, but on a much larger scale.
It would be great on our ESX servers that have 64GB of memory each, but it seems it is a bit too early in terms of ram for something like this.
I predict in the future we will use SSDs for only large file (media) storage, and our entire memory space will be what we currently call a RAMdisk, turned non-volatile. Even then SSDs wont come with the computer, it will be an optional thing you buy on the side, like external hard drives today. On another note, threading on multiple cores will be possible using a single thread (programs will no longer have to be programmed for multi-threading, this is done at the hardware level). Core clocks will be standardized, probably somewhere between 2 and 3 GHZ across the board, and when we look at processors in the future, we will be deciding between shared cache, and wether we want the 600-core enthusiast or the high-end 560-core intel CPU.
We are mirrored locally and off-site, with 2 generators locally, 1 generator off-site, and an UPS array on both sites.
To take us down, both our on-site and the off-site 10 miles away would have to blow up simultaneously.
We aren't a large company, we have less than 300 employees, and ~250 of them are truckers, probably less than 50 physical workstations. We do have some very large and very important databases though.
I am sure you take similar steps for TPU also.
Not sure I would pay for this though. As stated before ASRock has some software that can do this and its free. On Apple computers running OS X you can setup a RAM disc for free without the addition of software (just use a terminal command). And finally there are free versions of simple software that can do this for Windows and OS X as well.
IMO AMD should be thanking their customers with some nice little freebees but if they insist on selling it I expect it will be cheap.
I’ve got a Core i7 3930K with 32GB of DDR3 1600 RAM and I have been meaning to setup something like this.
It will replace smartdrive.exe for MS-DOS :laugh:
Boneface
Would be great if they could adapt this tool for something like that.