Next-Generation NVMe SSD and I/O Technology [PC, PS5, XBSX|S]

Have you updated the firmware on your drive? Mine is using whatever firmware was on it out of the box.

 

Same drive got me 6521, but with a cheap heatsink.

 

Haven't done any firmware update as Samsung doesn't provide any updates for these drives because they are for OEM market leaving the distribution of possible FW upgrades for system integrators, so that is a minor downside for this drive.

The drive has 2021.04 on the sticker so the firmware shouldn't be too outdated anyway.

 

Crap, one has to update fw on the drives to now.... gahh

 

I always viewed NVMEs more like DIMMs too. I guess that's not quite right. When do we get firmware updates on RAM?

 

i am too old for this, I do not even have a computer I can stick that thingy into to do a firmware upgrade. I only got a macbook pro,

 

They're a lot more complicated. They have embedded processors and their own RAM pool. Firmware updates can have significant consequences.

 

Certainly not on the SN850 i've bought.

 

Could happen that it will be needed in the future?

 

It's not impossible but in most cases, the firmware updates are intended to increase longevity with certain filesystem usage cases and it's really unlikely anybody is going to be updating firmware to improve the usage of the PS5's wacky filesystem.

 

As an anecdote, I have another 2TB SN850 in my PC and I did have to upgrade its firmware recently for a rather significant performance increase. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-sn850-firmware-restores-amd-x570-performance-loss

(I'm not saying we'd ever need one for PS5, as it looks like it works just fine with the current FW and if anything a PS5 FW update could break but then fix compatibility).

 

Looks like 14GB/s PCIe5 SDD's could be with us before the end of the year. Even if that doesn't happen, Q1 22 seems highly likely.

https://wccftech.com/kioxia-unveils...st-double-the-io-performance-lower-latencies/

https://wccftech.com/phison-talks-n...ew-interfaces-up-to-14w-gen-5-28w-gen-6-tdps/

 

Chuck it in PS5 and see what it can do.

 

It will be limited by the internal PCI-E bandwidth there.

 

Aren't the current drives below the maximum transfer rate of the 4x PCIE lanes? (7.8Gb/s iirc)

If that's the case there could still be an improvement?

 

I really don't see such a big advantage for even faster PCIe lanes other than we can put more m.2 drives on it without loosing transfer speed.
Currently I don't see the point for SSDs (except for some professional edge cases) where such an SSD bandwidth is needed. The bigger problem I see is having space. More m.2 slots are always welcome but I guess it would be much easier (for the users and mainboard manufacturers) if they bring out a new SATA revision with such high transfer speeds, so we can get rid of the problem that everything has to stay directly on the mainboard.

For graphics cards the main memory might get more and more interesting the higher the bandwidth is. E.g. something like high-res textures packs do not need to be always in the GPU memory but might remain in the main memory pool instead (e.g. Vega cards have such a feature with HBCC). Yes I know with the consoles we have fast SSDs and this might come to the PC but I think on the PC it will need much, much longer to get a standard. Something like HBCC is than a welcome addition with higher and higher bandwidth between the RAM and GPU-memory. E.g. Vega 56 is able to load Farcry 6 high res textures thanks to HBCC support, while RTX 3070 cards cant load the highest settings.

 

I'm sure PS5s are reporting back on the type and configurations of NVMe drives that people are shoving in their PS5s. If an issue with a popular drive was identified, Sony could work the the drive manufacturer and push out updated drive firmware update through the next PS5 firmware update.

 

I guess you might see a tiny uplift over todays fastest PCIE 4 drives, provided you're not bottlenecked by the rest of the PS5's IO stack, but it'd be a pretty boring test compared to putting it in a PC where it can reach its full potential.

 

I'm not aware of any bottlenecks in the PS5 I/O stack. Mark Cerny said that on average [compression] it's transferring 8-9Gb/sec but with good compression it can handle 22Gb/sec, which is just bonkers. The NVMe drive and the limitations of compression are the bottlenecks to what the I/O is actually capable of.

 

There may not be any significant bottlenecks with the default SDD, but if you swap it out for an SDD that's almost 3x faster then you're quickly going to run into one somewhere. The compressed throughput isn't about how good the compression algorithm is, its a hardware decoder, it decodes Kraken. The compressed throughput is dependent on whether the data itself is easily compressible. On data sets that are trivially compressible you may see up to 22GB/s, while on data that's very difficult to compress, you will see something closer to 5.5GB/s. And over the course of an average game that averages out to 8-9GB/s or ~11GB/s with Oodle Texture.

Clearly that will create a bottleneck for a 14GB/s drive. Even the average 2:1 compression ratio (with Oodle Texture) resulting in 28GB/s would be beyond the peak limit of the hardware unit, let alone those corner cases of highly compressible data sets which might achieve 4:1 or 52GB/s throughput.

It was one of the Rad Game Tools guys that said the hardware decompression unit has been specifically designed to never bottleneck the PS5's native drive. That means that when it's being fed a compressed data stream at 5.5GB/s, regardless of the compression ratio achieved, it will always be able to decompress in real time. Speed that input up by 2-3x, or even just 40% and it stands to reason the hardware unit would no longer be able to keep up unless it had been heavily overengineered, and thus needlessly wasteful in terms of BoM. Which isn't something the consoles are generally known for.