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Broken Silicon Telegrams: Next Gen SSD Talk (Patreon)

Published:
2020-05-01 16:47:45
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Content

This is it - the big SSD episode.  In a day from now I will be interviewing the writer of the following article:

 https://meyertechrants.blogspot.com/2020/04/hardware-accelerated-io-in-consoles.html 


He is a programmer who recently posted quite a bit about next gen SSDs, and according to a couple of contacts...he seems to know his stuff.  In this Broken Silicon episode we will be talking everything SSD - XSX SSD, PS5 SSD, and what comes next for PC gamers.


I want to make sure I get your questions a day ahead of recording for a reason -  My SSD contact (he is an engineer specializing in SSD Controllers) has agreed to give feedback and insights on our conversation points and reader mail. This is a guy who knew what was in the XBOX and PS5 years before anyone (besides me?) started saying buzzwords like "Velocity" & "Kraken."


Please put extra effort into your questions for this one.  Use good grammar, be insightful, be concise, and leave the fanboy bullshit at home ;).  What questions do you have about the coming era of next gen storage & how it applies to gaming?

Comments

Anonymous

Are you glad something other than the same, tired old 20+ year old General Data Compression faces are getting a spot in the sun with the PS5? I sure am.

Dominik Koc

PCIE gen 6. 64GT/s. What does a PC and gaming world with those sorts of speeds look like? When will earth size world games be viable? A gen 6 4TB drive slapped on a GPU seems to do the trick? Thoughts? Comments? Are there any limitations on the horizon to prevent my vision?

The Immortal Cameraman

I wonder, would Intel's Optane SSDs be a sufficient stop-gap solution for pipeline issues on PC SSDs? Would we need to go in that direction before full implementation of SSD hardware akin to that of the PS5?

Andrew Martin

Do you anticipate a serious competitor for NAND flash SSD's in the next decade such as 3D XPoint or MRAM?

Mican Andrews

Given the big reason we saw the ps2 be so dominant over Xbox Dreamcast and GameCube was memory bandwidth. Ps2 wasn't the strongest console but it has insane throughput it seems Sony is trying to recreate the same with ps5 with more bandwidth it doesn't matter what features you lack on the hardware level since more can be done in software. What are your thoughts?

KarbinCry

1. What would you say are the most significant differences between logic, memory and flash lithography? 2. How significant is the role of software in high performance SSDs, with multiple tiers (RAM, SLC and then the bulk storage space with DLC or TLC)? 3. What are the biggest differences between the flash in SSDs and that in flash drives?

Anonymous

Will we see SSD minimal specifications for PC games listed amongst other hardware requirements in the future?

Anonymous

How will bandwidth discrepancies between Xbox, Playstation, and PC affect studios' programming for games? Will Studios develop games using the slowest common denominator? If so, Will faster SSD's make a huge difference in playability of games? Right now, having a gen 4 SSD vs a gen 3 SSD makes almost no difference in PC load times when gaming. With that being said, how much of a load time bump will we see with games and will we start to see more of a difference between gen 3 and gen 4 NVME now that console storage will be blazing fast?

Anonymous

Why was the development cycle for PCIe 4 SSDs so long? For example, Physon still hasn’t launched their fastest Gen 4 controller yet (neither has WD nor Micron nor Samsung).

Anonymous

What’s the biggest constraint when developing new NVME SSDs? Is it getting the controller to be fast enough? Are we reaching the read/write limits of NAND? And how will these issues present themselves(if they do at all) for PCIe 5 and beyond?

Anonymous

General thoughts on PLC (development was announced by Intel and Toshiba, IIRC) Vs. QLC and TLC?

Anonymous

Hardware accelerated IO, what is it and how it can be better?On PC!

qhfreddy

What kind of timescale would you expect the current two-level storage model to be changed significantly? Stuff like byte addressable non-volatile storage, that can be accessed as an extension of the memory address space? I feel like being able to access and map programs in non-volatile storage in the same way as we would in main or video memory would allow a lot of cutting back on the overheads that have motivated the development of IO complexes we see in modern consoles.

Anonymous

Console makers seem intent on using SSDs as an extension to VRAM, and that's why SSD speeds were brought to the forefront. However, we got no hard data on latency, which I imagine will have a significant effect on performance in this use case. Is this assertion correct? Have console makers managed to significantly lower latency with bespoke hardware? Finally, will we see more gaming SSDs on the PC market, much in the same way we see gaming RAM sticks with high bandwidth and tight timings?

Anonymous

I worked on (big iron) Flight Simulators in the early to mid 1980s. In our architecture we had a scenario processor (PDP/11) that would load the appropriate level of detail of terrain, features (eg trees, and building) and vehicles (eg opponent aircraft) from hard disks and pass them into the picture processors (GPU) which was 50x 4-board bit-slice computers. We could predict for many simulated aircraft what would be required from disk to be soon in the scene. Seek, settle and latency times were the physical limits of our load performance. To reduce the impact of those constraints I wrote software to optimise the disk sectors so that models and terrain that was geographically close was close on disk. What are the physical constraints to quickly access models from an SSD and what are the strategies available to games writers to reduce their impact?

Tommy

Should i as a consumer be looking forward to new generations of 3D XPoint? Will it ever offer noticable improvement over NAND SSDs?

Josh Law (adn)

Why don't we see more PCBs with things mounted on both sides of the pcb? And if it were to become more possible/common could there be cost savings in addition to possible space saving or increased density when it comes to SSDs, motherboards, or GPUs?

Aiden

What is the difference encoding Specifically for textures vs general data in an ssd and the pipeline?