Nvidia's Big Accelerator Memory: An SSD for your GPU
We're on the verge of the next generation of graphics processor units, but it's hard to stay focussed on what's right in front of us. At the end of this month, Nvidia is set to launch the hotly anticipated RTX 3090 Ti, which has a fair chance at being the most powerful gaming GPU we've ever seen. But the company has also teamed up with university researchers and IBM to unveil a new technology that already has us looking to the future of graphics cards.
According to The Register, BaM, or less excitingly, Big Accelerator Memory is Nvidia's new technology which allows a GPU to transfer to a computer's SSD without having to go through the CPU. This would allow for graphics cards to run far more independently of CPUs, as well as cut the load down on those processing chips. Conceptually it seems a bit similar to AMD's approach with the Radeon Pro SSG which had 2TB of SSD attached via M.2, which had a stronger gamer and content creation focus.
The case paper for BaM explains the benefits of using this new system:
«We show that (1) the BaM infrastructure software running on GPUs can identify and communicate the fine-grain accesses at a sufficiently high rate to fully utilize the underlying storage devices, (2) even with consumer-grade SSDs, a BaM system can support application performance that is competitive against a much more expensive DRAM-only solution, and (3) the reduction in I/O amplification can yield significant performance benefit.»
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All this means GPUs wouldn't necessarily have to rely on their own GDDR6 memory as
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