Yay, AM4 boards have M2 PCIe ssd support ?

[William Gaatjes]

I was reading this article at anandtech about the B350 chipset and Bristol Ridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10705/amd-7th-gen-bristol-ridge-and-am4-analysis-a12-9800-b350-a320-chipset

Since this is for budget systems, i can imagine that board with M2 PCIe ssd support would be rare.
Bristol ridge seems to support it, i can imagine that future zen products will do to.
I will as it looks now not be upgrading until zen has arrived for some time .
But i do would like my next build to have M2 ssd support on the mainboard.

There is also review at wccftech.

http://wccftech.com/amd-bristol-ridge-a12-9800-am4-platform-performance/

Any thoughts ?

 

[The Stilt]

Why wouldn't they, it is just a piece of software and some Gen. 3 PCI-E links?
There are even AM3+ and FM2+ motherboards with M.2 support.

 

[Abwx]

...........

https://www.computerbase.de/2016-09/amd-promontory-am4-zen-bristol-ridge/

 

[William Gaatjes]

I am sure it will become mainstream on all future motherboards from AMD.

 

[nerp]

M.2 is about to become mainstream. SATA is done.

 

[Azuma Hazuki]

Thank goodness. I/O from the primary storage device has been the bottleneck for at least 10 years. Where I work (well, at my first job, the second one is retail hell...) we make it a policy to give customers SSDs if they need drive replacements or in new builds, and the reactions have been universally positive, and that's just on plain ol' SATA. In some cases, SATA II or even (eep...) SATA I.

Now I'm imagining that my standard "budget" build will likely be BR + small NVMe SSD We're gonna do amazing things with this set of CPUs.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Thank goodness. I/O from the primary storage device has been the bottleneck for at least 10 years. Where I work (well, at my first job, the second one is retail hell...) we make it a policy to give customers SSDs if they need drive replacements or in new builds, and the reactions have been universally positive, and that's just on plain ol' SATA. In some cases, SATA II or even (eep...) SATA I.

Now I'm imagining that my standard "budget" build will likely be BR + small NVMe SSD We're gonna do amazing things with this set of CPUs.

Yeah, i am interested in the idea that the GPU can stream textures from the M2 ssd directly, bypassing main dram and the cpu through use of DMA. I do think current gpu's do not support this.
So, currently how it is done, the cpu starts a dma transfer from mass storage to dram memory and the gpu does a dma transfer from dram memory to gpu memory.
But with the mass storage controller right next to the cpu and as well on the chip, just as the integrated memory controller was a serious result in reduction in memory latency, i am positive that
getting access to the mass storage directly will result also in latency reductions and fore sure when the gpu can dma read from the mass storage devices directly. But the future will tell if this will happen.
It makes sense to me though...
But in order to do that efficiently, mass storage transfer speeds needs to bump up a bit. And i am sure it will.
I posted it a few years back about how the mass storage should have its own mass storage controller on the chip right next to the gpu and cpu. We are getting there. ^_^



PostScriptum.
(I should note, that that idea is nothing special. I work in the embedded world where everything is integrated on the chip for years. Just in a tiny fashion compared to the pc.)