The latest AMD Radeon SSG is not just a play on words

On Tuesday, AMD has announced its new brand new Radeon Pro SSG, with the latter part of its name being a not so subtle hint to the technology integrated into this card. The card features “...a full terabyte of SSG memory for very large dataset applications...”, according to AMD’s official press release. SSG memory is simply what AMD calls 1TB of NAND flash memory, which is essentially the same type of solid state storage found in the latest MacBook Pro.

The memory is supplied to the card through two PCIe 3.0 M.2 ports, and it’s meant to alleviate the system’s RAM from unnecessary workload. The Radeon Pro SSG was first showcased at Siggraph’s Computer Graphics Conference, successfully demonstrating 8K video playback at 30fps, with AMD stating that the card is capable of performing 8K playback, as well as real-time scrubbing, at up to 90fps, making this hardware very attractive for high-end graphic and VR production environments, as well as for scientific applications like deep learning and HPC.

With the Radeon Pro SSG, AMD is officially going toe-to-toe with NVIDIA, in a battle to win over the entire industry’s clientele spectrum, from regular consumers, and gamers, all the way up to industrial production environments.

At this stage, the Pro SSG is a great proof of concept, demonstrating the massive advantages of introducing non-volatile memory alongside AMD’s Polaris architecture. With that said, the initial $10,000 price tag, currently available for developers kits, isn’t likely to go down by much, by the time of the Pro SSG’s commercial release, this Fall.