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Tuesday, August 9th, 2016
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| 7:00a | AMD Releases Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.8.1 Hotfix
Hardly a week and a half has gone by and AMD has released another driver update. Of course with the flood of newly released cards we have seen released this summer I’m almost surprised driver updates aren’t more common. Along with new cards we get fixes for the Radeon RX 480, Crossfire, and a couple other applications. A Crossfire profile is even thrown in for good measure. AMD Radeon Software version 16.8.1 brings the driver version to 16.30.2511, continuing the driver branch introduced with RTG’s last update. With this driver update we are brought support for the AMD Radeon RX 470 and RX 460, which both saw release over the past few days. Of course it’s not an update without a few fixes. The first stop this week is some fixes for the Radeon RX 480. Previously the max memory overclock available to the RX 480 in Radeon WattMan was too low and has now been resolved, and low frame rate and stuttering issues in Wolfenstein: The Old Blood have been amended as well. In Overwatch there were problems with stability in the form of an application crash when playing on an RX 480 setup with Crossfire enabled. Continuing with Crossfire, DOTA2 was struggling with lower than expected performance while The Division experienced poor Crossfire scaling in some low resolution configurations. Following through with the other fixes Firefox should no longer experience an application crash when hardware acceleration is enabled for content playback, and Radeon Settings should now report the correct Vulkan API version number. To finish off the fixed issues, updating drivers through Radeon Settings should go smoother now with a fix for Radeon Settings failing previously with an error message. Along with support for new cards and a list of fixes, AMD also gave us a Crossfire profile for Codemasters F1 2016. As always, those interested in reading more or installing the updated hotfix drivers for AMD’s desktop, mobile, and integrated GPUs can find them either under the driver update section in Radeon Settings or on AMDs Radeon Software Crimson Edition download page. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8:00a | Netac Z5 USB 3.1 Gen 2 Portable SSD Review The last few years have seen rapid advancements in flash technology including planar 1x nm NAND, TLC, and 3D V-NAND. External high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.x have also become ubiquitous. These advances have led to the appearance of compact bus-powered direct attached storage units with very high performance for day-to-day data transfer applications. We have already looked at portable external SSDs such as the Samsung T1 and T3, as well as the SanDisk Extreme 900. Today, we will be looking at Netac's Z5, a portable SSD with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps Type-C interface. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8:01a | Seagate Introduces 10GB/s PCIe SSD And 60TB SAS SSD
Seagate is looking to break records with two enterprise SSDs they're showing off at Flash Memory Summit this week. The first drive is one that's been seen before: the 10GB/s PCIe x16 SSD that Seagate demonstrated in March. It has now been named the Nytro XP7200 and is scheduled for mass production in Q4. Based on four Nytro XM1440 M.2 SSDs under one heatsink on a full height expansion card, the XP7200 is more of a backplane than a drive on its own. Unlike some other multi-controller PCIe SSDs, the XP7200 does not include a PCIe switch chip. This means that the card can only be fully utilized in PCIe x16 slots that support operation as four separate x4 links. Plugging the XP7200 into a PCIe x8 slot would render two of the four M.2 drives inaccessible. And because there are four independent NVMe SSDs on the card, hitting the peak advertised read speed of 10GB/s requires the use of software-based RAID-0 or a similar striping scheme.
The performance specifications of the XP7200 show clearly the impact of using the capacity-optimized XM1440 models rather than the endurance optimized versions. Despite boasting total sequential read speeds of 10GB/s and almost one million IOPS for 4kB random reads, the write performance isn't earth-shattering. The XP7200 will be available in capacities of either 3.8TB or 7.7TB, as a result of populating it with either the 960GB XM1440 or the newer 2TB model. With the Nytro XP7200 moving toward production, Seagate has brought out another SSD tech demo with eye-catching specifications. The unnamed SAS SSD packs 60TB of 3D TLC into a 3.5" drive. In order to connect over a thousand dies of Micron's 3D TLC NAND to a single SSD controller, Seagate has introduced ONFi bridge chips to multiplex the controller's NAND channels across far more dies than would otherwise be possible. The rest of the specs for the 60TB SSD look fairly mundane and make for a drive that's better suited to read-intensive workloads, but the capacity puts even the latest hard drives to shame.
The 60TB SSD is currently just a technology demonstration, and won't be appearing as a product until next year. When it does, it will probably have a very tiny market, but for now it will give Seagate some bragging rights. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 10:45a | Micron Announces QuantX Branding For 3D XPoint Memory (UPDATED)
In a keynote speech later this morning at Flash Memory Summit, Micron will be unveiling the branding and logo that their products based on 3D XPoint memory will be using. The new QuantX brand is Micron's counterpart to Intel's Optane brand and will be used for the NVMe storage products that we will hear more about later this year. 3D Xpoint memory was jointly announced by Intel and Micron shortly before last year's Flash Memory Summit and we analyzed the details that were available at the time. Since then there has been very little new official information but much speculation. We do know that the initial products will be NVMe SSDs rather than NVDIMMs or other memory bus attached devices. In the meantime, Micron VP Darren Thomas goes on stage at 11:30 AM PT, and we'll update with any further information.
Gallery: Gallery Title
     UPDATE: Micron's keynote reiterated their strategy of positioning 3D XPoint and thus QuantX products in between NAND flash and DRAM, with the advantages of 3d XPoint relative to each highlighted (while the disadvantages go unmentioned). But then they moved on to showing some meaningful performance graphs from actual benchmarks of QuantX drives.
The factor of ten improvement in both read and write latency for NVMe drives is great, but perhaps the more impressive results are the graphs showing queue depth scaling. In a comparison of U.2 NVMe drives, Micron showed performance of QuantX drives ranging from 200GB to 1600GB, relative to a 1600GB NAND flash NVMe SSD. The QuantX drives saturated the PCIe x4 link with a 70/30 mix of random reads and random writes with queue depths of just 4-6, while the NAND SSD gets nowhere close to saturating the link with random accesses. The next comparison was of the PCIe x8 add-in card performance, where the link was saturated with queue depths between 10 and 16, depending on the capacity of the QuantX drive.
This great performance at low queue depths will make it relatively easy for a wide variety of workloads to benefit from the raw performance 3D XPoint memory offers. By contrast, the biggest and fastest PCIe SSDs based on NAND flash often require careful planning on the software side to achieve full utilization.
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