By: Adrian (a.delete@this.acm.org), November 13, 2020 5:14 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on November 12, 2020 6:51 pm wrote:
> hobold (hobold.delete@this.vectorizer.org) on October 31, 2020 5:34 am wrote:
> > blue (blue.delete@this.blue.com) on October 30, 2020 11:52 am wrote:
> > [...]
> > > RX 6000 series? "Smart Memory Access" is the CPU and GPU working together to extract more performance?
> >
> > A bit more info was released, and this seems to be rather mundane.
> > The CPU is allowed to open a much wider addressing
> > window into GPU VRAM. It used to be a 256MB aperture, now
> > it can be all of 16GB at once. With this "Smart Memory
> > Access" feature, most bank switching / segmentation / manual addressing overhead can be avoided.
>
> I have been wondering what in the new CPUs is required to allow this. I do not remember anything
> in the way PCI works that would have prevented direct access to GPU memory in the past.
>
NVIDIA has announced that they are working at a similar feature, which will be released soon for their Ampere GPUs (presumably by a firmware update) and which should work both with AMD and with Intel CPUs.
https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1327006795253084161
> hobold (hobold.delete@this.vectorizer.org) on October 31, 2020 5:34 am wrote:
> > blue (blue.delete@this.blue.com) on October 30, 2020 11:52 am wrote:
> > [...]
> > > RX 6000 series? "Smart Memory Access" is the CPU and GPU working together to extract more performance?
> >
> > A bit more info was released, and this seems to be rather mundane.
> > The CPU is allowed to open a much wider addressing
> > window into GPU VRAM. It used to be a 256MB aperture, now
> > it can be all of 16GB at once. With this "Smart Memory
> > Access" feature, most bank switching / segmentation / manual addressing overhead can be avoided.
>
> I have been wondering what in the new CPUs is required to allow this. I do not remember anything
> in the way PCI works that would have prevented direct access to GPU memory in the past.
>
NVIDIA has announced that they are working at a similar feature, which will be released soon for their Ampere GPUs (presumably by a firmware update) and which should work both with AMD and with Intel CPUs.
https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1327006795253084161