fixxxer113 :
babernet_1 :
Imagine having this on a gaming GPU. You could load all the levels and textures and all on the internal SSD so your game would never pause between levels or new areas.
I think that's the end goal. Storage is slowly moving towards having one big pool that's fast enough to be used for anything (data storage, RAM, VRAM etc.). It would also simplify the architecture of a PC, since you wouldn't need all kinds of different slots and maybe make graphics cards smaller, if their VRAM was no longer on the PCB but part of one big chunk of memory/storage connected to the motherboard.
You're still going to have RAM in your PC. It'll just be stacked inside the CPU package. The performance benefits to be gained by that are too great to pass up.
And if games are pausing between levels, even if your data is on a fast SSD, then the game is doing more than simply reading the data. Also, since the CPU needs a significant amount of that data, the pauses won't magically disappear, just by moving the storage into the GPU.
Xajel :
The Idea is impressive, although I don't see any use for it in our consumer applications..
Agreed. There are good reasons, besides cost, that AMD launched this for professional applications. The main one being that PCs hardware and games are pretty well adapted to each other. There's not much potential, here, for anything concerning typical users. Remember, the original reason graphics cards even
have programmable shaders is so that they can generate
petabytes worth of texture & geometry, on the fly.
Besides, by the time this could trickle down to consumers, you'll have a fast APU with HBM2 on the inside, and NV DIMMs in the slots. It's still not quite the same thing, but much more relevant and interesting for day-to-day uses.
That said, non-volatile memory will probably be an enduring feature of professional GPUs, but I still don't foresee it appearing in consumer hardware.