> AMD has the patents for putting a SSD directly on the card, they could be killing it in the home AI market, but.... they just can't get it together.
Radeon SSG was just a PCIe switch chip on-card, with the SSD+GPU behind it, so functionally it is the same as having the SSD on the motherboard.
I'm not sure if they got patents but either way the problem it solved was not the one people think it solved. It wasn't "using the SSD as memory", and in the way that it did (block storage) any other SSD+GPU can function identically in the same way without needing the SSG tech. Putting the SSD on your mobo performs as high in every way on any GPU (CUDA RDMA Direct have been around for a while, since Fermi/Kepler at least).
It was just a convenience thing of getting a SSD mountpoint built into your GPU basically. They even showed up as a HBA in windows and were treated as a striped disk.
More recently this idea has re-surfaced with some of the modern GPUs with x8 interfaces (6600XT, 4060 Ti, etc) getting a couple M.2 drives in the other x4x4 via bifurcation, and this functionally performs the same as SSG but without the switch chip (needs hardware support instead). And if there are patents around using a switch chip that may be how the patent is evaded. But combination cards utilizing more than one type of hardware in general is not that novel (network card/ssd combos are another popular one) and I'm not sure AMD patented it or it's defensibly novel against prior art.
Radeon SSG was just a PCIe switch chip on-card, with the SSD+GPU behind it, so functionally it is the same as having the SSD on the motherboard.
I'm not sure if they got patents but either way the problem it solved was not the one people think it solved. It wasn't "using the SSD as memory", and in the way that it did (block storage) any other SSD+GPU can function identically in the same way without needing the SSG tech. Putting the SSD on your mobo performs as high in every way on any GPU (CUDA RDMA Direct have been around for a while, since Fermi/Kepler at least).
It was just a convenience thing of getting a SSD mountpoint built into your GPU basically. They even showed up as a HBA in windows and were treated as a striped disk.
https://youtu.be/-fEjoJO4lEM?t=62
More recently this idea has re-surfaced with some of the modern GPUs with x8 interfaces (6600XT, 4060 Ti, etc) getting a couple M.2 drives in the other x4x4 via bifurcation, and this functionally performs the same as SSG but without the switch chip (needs hardware support instead). And if there are patents around using a switch chip that may be how the patent is evaded. But combination cards utilizing more than one type of hardware in general is not that novel (network card/ssd combos are another popular one) and I'm not sure AMD patented it or it's defensibly novel against prior art.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-demos-geforce-rtx-406...