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
I have a new trinity laptop at home I am setting up, and it has 8GB of RAM since I upgraded it to take advantage of dual channel (for all of $18 you think they would have done this anyway).
Might have to give it a try.
Still a dumb idea. We just purchased 64GB of ram for our server workstations for a couple hundred.
You don't say.
I am saying the difference in latency from Vram & PCIe VS DDR3 ram. Plus with dynamic clocking on Vram to save power. With 8GB of system RAM I don't believe the tech will ever use more than about 4GB, but I would never use this in a production environment, the last thing I need is it bombing out during a firmware update and killing a $5K component and costing me a day or two.
Perhaps if it got a user 5% higher FPS in a demanding game it would be worth it. GTA comes to mind where their streaming protocol for the world is ineffective at times, having it all cached in RAM would be beneficial.
Have you ever actually ran performance monitoring while playing a game?
The software caches "hot files"that are accessed often in the "drive" for faster access. All you need to look at is hard faults, parent process and files to determine what needs cached. Those little hiccups and missing textures now go away. As good as windows is at memory management, there is the limitation of the program and what it calls and can allocate of system RAM, this is just a way around those limitations.
In the case of RAMdisk, everything is first loaded from RAMdisk into your RAM, therefore RAMdisk is totally taken out of the equasion until something else needs to be loaded into memory by the game.
When the game needs something on demand, like textures, it will grab that from the RAM.
There are significant improvements to more RAM, but you eventually hit a wall with it too, then it becomes the next slowest part, which is the HDD.
Cache, Ram, HDD
A cached read from RAM eliminates a significant portion of these steps and thus time, and during boot as well during dependent execution of a program the next step may or may not be loaded into RAM if that data has not been called yet. Even at 500MBps for a SSD, or 800MBps for my array it is significantly slower than system RAM.
RAMdisk software has been around for awhile, but it is still going to be years before many are brave enough or comfortable enough to put it into production environments.
Use virtual box, install windows XP, it should be less than 10GB, copy that virtual hard drive to the ram disk and then boot it. See what happens ;-)
I've been watching it develop over the last 2 years, and with their latest version, it is very fast. And FREE. www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/