AMD Jumps Into the SSD Market: Radeon R7 Series SSD Launched

Back in 2011, AMD made a rather unexpected move and expanded its Radeon brand to include memory in addition to graphics cards. With today’s announcement AMD is adding another member to its Radeon family by releasing Radeon R7 Series SSDs. Similar to AMD memory, AMD is not actually designing or manufacturing the SSDs as the product design and manufacturing is handled by OCZ. In fact, all the customer support is also handled by OCZ, so aside from the AMD logo AMD is not really involved in the product.

Partnering with OCZ makes sense because OCZ’s focus with the Barefoot 3 platform has always been gamers and enthusiasts and that is the target group for AMD’s R7 SSDs as well. OCZ is a now owned by Toshiba, so OCZ has direct access to NAND with guaranteed supply, whereas fabless OEMs (e.g. Kingston) could face supply issues that might harm AMD. Here’s the quick overview, which of course will be essentially the same as certain existing Barefoot 3 products.

The R7 is based on OCZ’s own Barefoot 3 controller and it is the same higher clocked M00 version (397MHz) as in the Vector 150. The new ARC 100 and Vertex 460 use the M10 version, which runs at 352MHz instead of 397MHz but is otherwise the same silicon. Performance wise the R7 SSD is very close to Vector 150 with slightly lower random write performance, although random read performance is marginally better in turn.

The biggest difference between the two is endurance as the Vector 150 is rated at 50GB per day for five years (91TB total) while the R7 is rated at 30GB per day for four years (43TB total). The firmware in the R7 is tailored for AMD, although I was told that the customizations are mainly wear-leveling related to increase endurance over the Vertex 460, so there should not be any surprises in performance. The NAND is also different as the R7 utilizes Toshiba’s A19nm MLC, but OCZ should be making the switch to A19nm across its whole client SSD lineup soon to cut costs. 

The motivation behind AMD’s move is identical to the reason AMD entered the memory market. AMD wants to provide users an “AMD-only” experience by offering as many of the components as possible. Another argument AMD had is that providing more AMD branded products makes it easier for novice PC builders to pick the parts because the buyer does not have to go through the trouble of deciding between dozens of products and making sure the parts are compatible with each other. In addition to providing an easier purchase experience, AMD can also use the R7 SSDs in bundles and promotions, which is definitely more lucrative than using third party components. 

Of course, the ultimate reason behind the move is that SSDs are becoming a mainstream product, and they provide another revenue source for AMD. AMD has not been doing that great financially lately and having an extra low risk revenue source is definitely welcome, even though client SSDs are not exactly a high profit market anymore. Then again, AMD is not investing much into SSDs since development and manufacturing is done by OCZ, so even if Radeon R7 SSD sales end up being low, AMD has no long-term investment to protect. The announced pricing is generally in line with what we’re seeing for the existing OCZ Vector 150 products, though mail-in rebates can actually drop the Vector 150 below Radeon R7 SSD levels.

All in all, the R7 will not provide much from a technological standpoint since it uses the same platform we have tested several times, but it will be interesting to see how AMD bundles the R7 with other AMD products. AMD now has an opportunity to provide even more extensive bundles (CPU/APU, GPU, RAM and SSD); all that’s left is for AMD to begin offering Radeon branded motherboards, power supplies, and cases to provide the ultimate AMD-only experience. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but AMD is trying an aggressive bundling strategy to increase their desktop CPU sales.

We have samples of the Radeon R7 SSD on the way, so stay tuned for the full review!

FMS 2014: HGST Announces FlashMAX III PCIe SSDs

Continuing with our Flash Memory Summit coverage, HGST announced their FlashMAX III enterprise SSD, which is the first fruit of HGST’s Virident acquistion and continues Virident’s FlashMAX brand. The FlashMAX III will come in half-height, half-length form factor and will be available in capacities of 1100GB, 1650GB and 2200GB. The controller is an FPGA-based 32-channel design with a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, but there is no NVMe support since the FlashMAX III builds on the same architecture as the previous generation FlashMAX II. 

The maximum throughput seems a bit low for a design that uses up eight PCIe 3.0 lanes since 2.7GB/s should be achievable with just four PCIe 3.0 lanes. Obviously performance scaling is not that simple but for example Samsung’s XS1715 (which we will be reviewing soon!) is rated at up to 3.0GB/s while only consuming four PCIe 3.0 lanes. Using less PCIe lanes allows for more drives to be delpoyed as the amount of PCIe lanes is always rather limited.

The 1650GB model is even slower due to the fact that it utilizes less NAND channels because it is a middle capacity. Basically, the 1100GB and 2200GB models have the same number of NAND packages, with the 2200GB model having twice as much NAND per package; the 1650GB model uses the higher capacity packages but doesn’t fully populate the board. HGST told us that they are just testing the water to see if there is demand for something in between 1100GB and 2200GB.

The FlashMAX III also supports Virident Flash-management with Adaptive Shceduling (vFAS), which is a fancy name for Virident’s storage driver. vFAS presents the FlashMAX as a single volume block device to the OS, meaning that no additional storage protocols or controllers are needed, whereas some drives just use a RAID controller or need software RAID solutions to be configured into an array. Additionally vFAS handles NAND management by doing wear-leveling, garbage collection, data path protection, NAND-level parity, ECC, and more. 

The FlashMAX III is currently being qualified by select OEMs and will ship later in this quarter. 

FMS 2014: SanDisk ULLtraDIMM to Ship in Supermicro’s Servers

We are running a bit late with our Flash Memory Summit coverage as I did not get back from the US until last Friday, but I still wanted to cover the most interesting tidbits of the show. ULLtraDIMM (Ultra Low Latency DIMM) was initially launched by SMART Storage a year ago but SanDisk acquired the company shortly after, which made ULLtraDIMM a part of SanDisk’s product portfolio.

The ULLtraDIMM was developed in partnership with Diablo Technologies and it is an enterprise SSD that connects to the DDR3 interface instead of the traditional SATA/SAS and PCIe interfaces. IBM was the first to partner with the two to ship the ULLtraDIMM in servers, but at this year’s show SanDisk announced that Supermicro will be joining as the second partner to use ULLtraDIMM SSDs. More specifically Supermicro will be shipping ULLtraDIMM in its Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms and availability is scheduled for Q4 this year. 

We have not covered the ULLtraDIMM before, so I figured I would provide a quick overview of the product as well. Hardware wise the ULLtraDIMM consists of two Marvell 88SS9187 SATA 6Gbps controllers, which are configured in an array using a custom chip with a Diablo Technologies label, which I presume is also the secret behind DDR3 compatibility. ULLtraDIMM supports F.R.A.M.E. (Flexible Redundant Array of Memory Elements) that utilizes parity to protect against page/block/die level failures, which is SanDisk’s answer to SandForce’s RAISE and Micron’s RAIN. Power loss protection is supported as well and is provided by an array of capacitors. 

The benefit of using a DDR3 interface instead of SATA/SAS or PCIe is lower latency because the SSDs sit closer to the CPU. The memory interface has also been designed with parallelism in mind and can thus take greater advantage of multiple drives without sacrificing performance or latency. SanDisk claims write latency of less then five microseconds, which is lower than what even PCIe SSDs offer (e.g. Intel SSD DC P3700 is rated at 20µs).

Unfortunately there are no third party benchmarks for the ULLtraDIMM (update: there actually are benchmarks) so it is hard to say how it really stacks up against PCIe SSDs, but the concept is definitely intriguing. In the end, NAND flash is memory and putting it on the DDR3 interface is logical, even though NAND is not as fast as DRAM. NVMe is designed to make PCIe more flash friendly but there are still some intensive workloads that should benefit from the lower latency of the DDR3 interface. Hopefully we will be able to get a review sample soon, so we can put ULLtraDIMM through our own tests and see how it really compares with the competition.