Re:AMD Announces 7950X3D, 7900X3D Upto 128MB L3 Cache
by nightski on Thursday January 05, 2023 @01:57PM
(#34264671)
I was mainly talking about my usage patterns, not every desktop or workstation user. I work with a lot of data daily.
Something more general might be game asset load speed. Those are often sequential reads. They put a ton of engineering effort into the latest consoles simply to improve that one thing.
Re:AMD Announces 7950X3D, 7900X3D Upto 128MB L3 Cache
by wtallis on Thursday January 05, 2023 @04:57PM
(#34267389)
> They put a ton of engineering effort into the latest consoles simply to improve that one thing.
Most of that effort was to ensure the processors could actually ingest data at the speeds that off the shelf SSDs could deliver it. The Xbox Series X shipped with what was a low-end NVMe SSD at the time, and the PS5 used a custom SSD controller primarily so they could hit their performance targets using older, slower flash memory rather than being constrained by the supply of the faster flash that was just reaching the market at that time.
And there are still hardly any games that even make a serious attempt to use the available storage performance.
I think for general use most desktop and workstation users are going to get more benefits from faster random access and won't notice very high linear access speeds. I have two recent SSDs and one of them has a median access time of 12µs and the other has a median of 30µs. Even though the latter has gaudy benchmark numbers, can stream at many GB/s and can ultimately hit almost a million IOPS, higher-level application benchmarks lead me to prefer the former because random access waiting time is more important.