Lagspike_exe

Banned
Dec 15, 2017
1,974
This is really cool tech. It can fill up 24GB of RAM in less than a second under perfect conditions.
But too expensive and probably not efficient from value/$ perspective right now. I'd rather take a 1TB 4GB/s NVMe for the same price or so.
 

Roukira

Member
Dec 1, 2018
606
France, Paris
This is really interesting but do you really think we can expect this in PS5 ?
It looks like it will cost a lot for low storage, and while the speeds are really good it still has a huge latency compared to RAM latencies no ? (iirc ram latencies are of nanoseconds order while this is microseconds) This would mean it won't replace RAM, so you'd have to account for RAM + this + SSD ?
 

pj-

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
1,659
I could see Sony go with 32GB ReRam together with 32GB GDDR6 Ram. I think that 32GB is enough for next gen games

Aside from standby power consumption, why would that be preferable to just having a 32GB DDR4 ramdisk? Would 32GB of reram be cheaper than 32GB of DDR4?

They could probably even get around the power usage by writing the 32gb cache to ssd when you put the console to sleep, and loading it back into memory when you wake it.
 

Bomblord

Self-requested ban
Banned
Jan 11, 2018
6,390
What kind of interface would you be using to hit those speeds? Is it literally just a non-volatile ram stick?
 

Cripterion

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,104
I

Transfer speeds of older tech:
  • Today's retail PCIe gen4 x4 NVME SSDs top at around 5 GB/s.
  • Mass consumer PCIe gen3 NVME SSDs are around 3 GB/s
  • Old SATA3 SSDs are 512 MB/s
  • PS4 - HDD in PS4 [with very slow seek speeds of a laptop drive] is 150 MB/s sequential, 40 MB/s for small files [and can go lower for very small files, PS4 Spider-Man was made to load 20MB/s while Spidey is swinging across the city]
  • PS3 - 22 GB/s to VRAM, 25.6 GB/s to system memory [not counting other caches]
  • Xbox 360 - 21.6 GB/s to VRAM, 22.4 GB/s to system memory [not counting other caches]
  • Nintendo Switch - 25.6 GB/s to system LPDDR memory [at 1600MHz]
  • PC DDR4transfer rates:
    • DDR4 2133:17 GB/s
    • DDR4 2400:19.2 GB/s
    • DDR4 2666:21.3 GB/s
    • DDR4 3200:25.6 GB/s

LC0rk6A.jpg
 
Feb 10, 2018
17,534
I could see Sony go with 32GB ReRam together with 32GB GDDR6 Ram. I think that 32GB is enough for next gen games

Yeah, @ $599, with a $100 loss.

Also can some one explain to me why 16gb gddr6 + 8gb reram + gen4 ssd is better then 16gbgddr6 + 8gb ddr4 +gen4 ssd? The ddr4 option would probably be cheaper. And whatever happened to Cernys talk that a single pool of ram is better then split pools?
 

Atolm

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,851
This is so cutting edge that it's nonsense to think it will be on PS5. Sounds like an enterprise product.
 

PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Oct 26, 2017
24,052
To make money from it? What kind of question is this? Sony is more than Playstation.

Creating it but selling it to other third parties and not profit from it in their flagship and obviously the future most sold product, more than anywhere? I don't think they are that silly.
 
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vivftp

Member
Oct 29, 2017
19,920
Creating it but selling it to otehr third prties and not profit from it in their flagship and obviously the future most sold product, more than anywhere? I don't think they are that silly.

Well this tech will certainly be used in their professional camera products where users are used to paying an extreme premium for performance. But yeah I'm of the opinion that this will be in the PS5 in some manner and I've stated my reasons for thinking so in the next gen thread.

I also wouldn't be surprised if this ReRAM tech is also being discussed in Sony and Microsofts MOU for potential use in Azure datacenters. They made mention of Sony's semi conductor division during that announcement and did specify image sensors, but there's no reason why this couldn't be on the table as a bargaining chip as well.
 

SharpX68K

Member
Nov 10, 2017
10,587
Chicagoland
I only skimmed through this thread.

Is Sony's ReRAM tech likely to be in PS5?

All I could gather was that this is something that goes in between mass storage (I.e. an SSD) And System memory/DRAM like GDDR6.
 
Oct 25, 2017
5,596
Racoon City
Man some of you will be crushed by the hype you've set up for yourselves based on nothing but your own conjecture.

By all the baseless rumors we've seen, PS5 now has: 128GB of ReRAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, alongside everything else and will be sold for $499

lol aight
 

mugurumakensei

Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you!
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,395
I see. The main thing seemed to be the timing, Sony ReRAM ramping up in 2020, I guess many of us just assumed it was primarily for PS5.

Ah well.

well, the biggest reason aside from cost for why the technology would not be in the PS5 is it would run afoul of EU regulations for standby power consumption. Indeed, with it using so much power in standby, it's unable to be used in consumer electronics in Europe which is PlayStation's strongest market by market share.
 

Taffy Lewis

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,529
Most likely, we'll have cheap TLC or QLC NAND connected via NVMe with 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes and a small SLC cache. This will mean all those maximum throughput numbers are theoretical, because the NAND can't really service them when writing at least, but it will still be an enormous improvement over current consoles and will be more than fast enough for gaming.
 

tokkun

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,454
What kind of interface would you be using to hit those speeds? Is it literally just a non-volatile ram stick?

PCI-E 5 8X / 16X. The slide posted in the OP shows 4 & 8-KB read / write sizes. That means it is a block storage device (like SSDs) rather than a load-store device (like DIMMs).
 
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Arebours

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,656
Anyone know what kind of latency these things have?

Creating it but selling it to otehr third prties and not profit from it in their flagship and obviously the future most sold product, more than anywhere? I don't think they are that silly.
consoles are balanced systems. you don't just tack on stuff because you can since cost go up for possibly no real benefit. once you have a cpu and gpu you can calculate how much throughput you can make use of and then scale the memory to fit that.
 
Oct 26, 2017
7,981
Interesting how this was from January but didn't get any attention. Without any idea of cost, I'm not sure what to think, but it makes sense to use it if it happens to be (surprisingly) cheap.
 

mugurumakensei

Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you!
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,395
Interesting how this was from January but didn't get any attention. Without any idea of cost, I'm not sure what to think, but it makes sense to use it if it happens to be (surprisingly) cheap.

no. The power consumption means it can't legally be sold in consumer electronics that support standby in Europe.
 

Inuhanyou

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
14,214
New Jersey
so its an ultra specialized cache like we expected rather than a full on SSD? Its better for allowing more options for storage. with this you could probably use HDD as storage and then use the cache to create the SSD effect depending on which games are prioritized
 
OP
OP
DieH@rd

DieH@rd

Member
Oct 26, 2017
10,726
no. The power consumption means it can't legally be sold in consumer electronics that support standby in Europe.
ReRam is a non-volatile type of memory. Data should retained even after drive is powered down, same as with regular HDD/SDD.

DRAM on the other hand needs a regular refreshing to retain it's data while in suspend/hibernate mode, but that does not use a lot of power. We'll see how much GDDR6 will PS5 have.

According to tests, PS4 Rest mode uses around 10W by default. Turning on "Keep Application Suspended" on PS4 uses 1.2W of additional power [for periodic background refreshing of CPU, GPU, caches and DRAM states]. USB charging option adds 6.3W and Network monitoring 2.4W.
 

Vinx

Member
Sep 9, 2019
1,438
My impression is that most agree it's quite unlikely.
My impression is that any likeliness at this time is impossible to discern.

Remember back when most agreed that it would be quite unlikely that PS4 would have more than 2GB of RAM?

But, hey, let's hear some more predictions! These topics are always a gold mine of hilarity when the consoles are revealed.
 

Pwnz

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Oct 28, 2017
14,279
Places
Super fast cache drive makes sense. If you play 1 game at a time and use standby, load times are instant. But the main HDD probably will be something like HDD for cost savings.
 

vivftp

Member
Oct 29, 2017
19,920
I don't think we'll see a normal HDD anywhere in the PS5 and don't think they'll even give you the option to install one. Any replaceable storage options will be SSD most likely.
 

Hieroph

Member
Oct 28, 2017
8,995
Sounds really cool. This could actually change the way games are even designed, or at the very least open up completely new design opportunities.

It's a really interesting subject, it seems like a big improvement even compared to regular SSDs. Which makes me believe it's expensive as hell.

This makes me think that Sony will want to keep the PS4 around for as long as they can because PS5 will not see $199 prices for a very long time.
 
Oct 25, 2017
1,205
So, to put it bluntly for those who can't quite figure out what all these numbers mean:

Game comes on BD, installs from (hopefully faster) BD Drive into HDD/SSD "Cold" storage, Start game, a significant portion gets shunted to the Cache SSD, game loads from cache to RAM, game plays from RAM.

So Devs will still need to be smart about how they get new stuff on the cache, much like Optane (Perhaps the Devs will be able to precache part of a game as the new "installation" method to reduce initial loads?) but for frequently used assets, etc, but once it's in the cache, it's gonna be essentially instant.

(Even without ReRAM, this is pretty much how caching works.)
 

TAJ

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
12,446
If this actually happens it will be funny to see the people claiming that it's impossible/too expensive claim that it's not impressive.
 

Deleted member 10612

User requested account closure
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Oct 27, 2017
2,774
So if ReRam is as cheap in 2020 as NAND and Sony can make these themselves, why woulndt they use this instead of off the shelf SSDs in the PS5?
 

MrKlaw

Member
Oct 25, 2017
33,341
nice find, here are the slides of analyst expectations:


So, professional expectations are that next year Crosspoint ReRAM could be in the price range of SLC NAND.

'especially if you're buying them from yourself and have a big customer (yourself) helping to drive enough volume to lower costs - with knock on benefits for selling externally to the market
 

Temascos

Member
Oct 27, 2017
12,615
My understanding of all these terms are very limited, but from the sounds of it I think they're saying it's kinda like a great mid-point between NAND and DRAM. It provides a big, practical boost but at the same time it doesn't price out people buying the systems. Am I understanding that right?
 

chris 1515

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,077
Barcelona Spain
So if ReRam is as cheap in 2020 as NAND and Sony can make these themselves, why woulndt they use this instead of off the shelf SSDs in the PS5?

SLC NAND is the most expensive NAND, this is three time the cost of TLC NAND and four times the cost of QLC NAND. A 1 Tb Reram would cost 400/500 dollars in retail and probablt 200/250 dollars cost to make not something you let in a console.
 

tokkun

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,454
So if ReRam is as cheap in 2020 as NAND and Sony can make these themselves, why woulndt they use this instead of off the shelf SSDs in the PS5?

Off-the-shelf SSDs using SLC NAND for storage do not exist anymore. They were too expensive to be viable, even for enterprise customers. The only place you see SLC in SSDs these days is as a small on-board cache on extremely cheap models that don't want to pay for a DRAM cache.

If the slide is correct and ReRAM costs as much as SLC NAND, that rules it out as being used for main storage. Using it as a cache could be possible, but certainly less exciting.
 

low-G

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,144
How does SLC NAND price compare with RAM prices? If used as a cache, RAM would be better, is SLC still a lot cheaper than RAM?
 

SirBaron

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
853
I have no clue what this all means. Does this mean it comes with some kind of chip that can read normal HDDs really fast?

That's impossible, HDD's only work at their rated speed and cant be "read" any faster than the drive can spin.

Let's assume that this uses a cache drive, then the games would have to know which assets to stream to the cache drive for temporary storage before they are needed otherwise the slower drive will still be a bottleneck, while you wait for stuff to be transferred over.
 

Hey Please

Avenger
Oct 31, 2017
22,824
Not America
I might end up eating crow but expecting this tech to be in PS5 sounds quite sci-fi. Then again, I never expected SSDs to be part of next either.

But if they do do it, how is it going to be integrated with the planned SSD storage? RAM cache -> ReRAM (acting as another larger and slower cache) -> NAND?
 

Phamit

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,949
I don't really believe PCIe 5.0 will be ready for consumer products next year. They say they producing it next year, but 4.0 only came out this year desktops. Is there any reason 5.0 would be adopted way faster?