In April, Mark Cenry mentioned to Wired that PS5 will use a new advanced SSD technology that will be customized to provide access speeds that are higher than anything currently avaiable on the PC market. In the months after that, AMD introduced PCIe Gen4 to PC users, boosting SSD speeds from ~3GB/s to ~5GB/s [and above for RAID solutions]. Many have believed that Sony would use some version of this traditional NAND tech, only optimized for faster use and smaller CPU overhead.
But now, Sony has detailed their new big persistent memory technology push that aims to become direct competitor in to Intel's Optane. They call it Cross Point ReRAM, and they are accelerating to deliver it to market in 2020. Advantage of ReRAM is ability to become cheaper with smaller process nodes [Optane will not be easy beyond 14nm], faster speeds than NAND, less power and heat than NAND, etc. They are focusing a lot of their efforts on making a smart and low-power controller for this type of drive.
Target specs:
128GB drive [8 x 16GB] - 25.6 GB/s read, 9.6 GB/s write, PCIe gen5 x8, target wattage 14.6W+
256GB drive [16 x 16GB] - 51.2 GB/s read, 19.2 GB/s write, PCIe gen5 x16, target wattage 27.2W+
Price is unknown, but 25 GB/s read is a tremendous number. That's today PC DDR4 RAM speed area, and total decimation of retail PC SSDs. 16 chip version has faster [presumably sequential] read speeds than any consumer-made non-OC PC RAM drive. :)
If PS5 is using this technology, we should stop expecting large primary memory pool for launching games. The setup will undoubtedly use smaller ReRAM drive [even this 128GB is insane enough, they could gimp it to work at high speed and it will still be a monster] and mass "cold storage" drive with cheaper SSD/HDD.
Transfer speeds of older tech:
But now, Sony has detailed their new big persistent memory technology push that aims to become direct competitor in to Intel's Optane. They call it Cross Point ReRAM, and they are accelerating to deliver it to market in 2020. Advantage of ReRAM is ability to become cheaper with smaller process nodes [Optane will not be easy beyond 14nm], faster speeds than NAND, less power and heat than NAND, etc. They are focusing a lot of their efforts on making a smart and low-power controller for this type of drive.
Target specs:
128GB drive [8 x 16GB] - 25.6 GB/s read, 9.6 GB/s write, PCIe gen5 x8, target wattage 14.6W+
256GB drive [16 x 16GB] - 51.2 GB/s read, 19.2 GB/s write, PCIe gen5 x16, target wattage 27.2W+
Price is unknown, but 25 GB/s read is a tremendous number. That's today PC DDR4 RAM speed area, and total decimation of retail PC SSDs. 16 chip version has faster [presumably sequential] read speeds than any consumer-made non-OC PC RAM drive. :)
If PS5 is using this technology, we should stop expecting large primary memory pool for launching games. The setup will undoubtedly use smaller ReRAM drive [even this 128GB is insane enough, they could gimp it to work at high speed and it will still be a monster] and mass "cold storage" drive with cheaper SSD/HDD.
Transfer speeds of older tech:
- Today's retail PCIe gen4 x4 NVME SSDs top at around 5 GB/s.
- Mass consumer PCIe gen3 NVME SSDs are around 3 GB/s
- Old SATA3 SSDs are 512 MB/s
- PS4 - HDD in PS4 [with very slow seek speeds of a laptop drive] is 150 MB/s sequential, 40 MB/s for small files [and can go lower for very small files, PS4 Spider-Man was made to load 20MB/s while Spidey is swinging across the city]
- PS3 - 22 GB/s to VRAM, 25.6 GB/s to system memory [not counting other caches]
- Xbox 360 - 21.6 GB/s to VRAM, 22.4 GB/s to system memory [not counting other caches]
- Nintendo Switch - 25.6 GB/s to system LPDDR memory [at 1600MHz]
- PC DDR4transfer rates:
- DDR4 2133：17 GB/s
- DDR4 2400：19.2 GB/s
- DDR4 2666：21.3 GB/s
- DDR4 3200：25.6 GB/s
