Sony's ReRAM plans - what can and can't ReRAM bring to a console? *spawn

You don't know that. You don't know if it will be cheaper - short term and long term.

A ReRAM solution will be a game-changer. Sony even has one with 51gb/s. But it has to be cost effective to make sense, we can all agree to that.

Is it cost effective though? That's the question. But there is enough data to surmise that it might be cost effective both near-term but more importantly long-term.

If the cost to manufacture initially (minus R&D and CAPEX) is at $30 for 128gb then it is a no brainer. Notwithstanding it's ability to stack and scale and chase Nand Flash in price. In fact, there is expectation for ReRAM to do that because IT WILL SCALE DOWN below 15nm.

 

Plus ReRAM will also solve the potentially problematic decompression at run-time taking away CPU bandwith and resources. You can uncompress large amount of data in ReRAM and never engage you cpu for streaming until you need to fetch more data from the cold storage.

 

Yet 128gb ReRAM or even that 256gb can be made in a "small form factor".

I would love a 128gb or even just 64gb of DDR4 as GPU memory for next-gen but we have enough data to prove that that would be prohibitively expensive. While ReRAM although having higher latency is POTENTIALLY much much cheaper.

We can all agree that it has to he cost-effective both near-term and long-term to make sense.

I have no idea how much PCIe 5.0 would cost. I tried searching but found no meaningful data. I would appreciate if you will enlighten me on this matter.

 

This was an eye-opener for me.

What's the new bottleneck with regards to load times?

One poster laid it out very nicely.

My speculation:

PS5 will achieve "no loading times" by using ReRAM as the cache to where game assets will be unpacked and decompressed. All game assets will be unpacked to the cache or just the immediately-needed assets depending on the scope, ambition, and visual fidelity of the game.
At 25.6gb/s, it can fill the main RAM in less than a second without ever needing to go through the hoops of decompressing the data.

 

The early leaks suggested HDD. But there are rumors of 1TB - 2TB of SSD. They could probably go with cheap SATA 4.0 SSD.

It depends on the game. As the Control developer said, "If games would stay the same in terms of scope and visual quality it’d make loading times be almost unnoticeable and restarting a level could be almost instant [in PS5 games]". But if they become ambitious and start to use that ultra-fast SSD to cache immediately-needed assets to showcase insane details then memory management (same as today) must be employed.

I'm speculating that there could still be a dedicated separate asic chip (cell cpu?). But it could be a cheap one because it doesn't need to be super fast.

We don't know the amount yet. But we have already seen a 128gb and 256gb version of ReRAM from Sony.

But if your worried about long load times when changing game, Sony could actually employ pre-caching on games enough to immediately boot a game. It will depend on the amount of ReRAM in there how much memory will Sony allocate for pre-caching and how much for caching currently played games. There doesn't need to be fix amount, it could be dynamic.

Again, I will point you to the statement by the Control developer. It depends on the scope, ambition and visual fidelity of the game on how big a game will be. If it's really too big then they will need to employ memory management again. I feel like there will be a separate dedicated asic decompressor so as to not bother the CPU processes.

 

I would say if the SSD is ultra-fast even at just 4gb/s then why even compress at all. Have it decompressed so that massive amount of data doesn't have to go through shuffling of data to decompress at run-time. The CPU/GPU can load them in-place and read to them directly without friction. But storage capacity would be a problem then I guess.

 

Exactly why cache approach makes sense even at 4gb/s. At 25.6gb/s it's a no brainer. (provided it's not prohibitively expensive)