AMD unveils 'monster' graphics card with 1TB NAND flash

Fiji-based graphics card can render 8k video at 90 frames per second

AMD has launched a monster graphics card with two integrated M.2 slots for up to 1TB of PCI Express-based NAND storage. However, buyers will have to find £7,600 to pay for one.

Graphics cards typically have a limited amount of memory, compared to the PCs they are fitted in, which is fine for most people but can prove troublesome when working with large datasets, common in the science, engineering and video industries.

AMD claims to have solved this problem with the Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics (SSG) card. The card uses an AMD Fiji GPU and features two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for adding up to 1TB of NAND flash, hugely increasing the available frame buffer for high-end rendering work.

Until now, AMD's largest card, the FirePro S1970, topped out at 32GB. AMD said that this makes the Radeon Pro SSG game-changing for 8K video, high-resolution rendering, virtual-reality content creation, oil and gas exploration, computational engineering, medical imaging and life sciences.

The semiconductor designer demonstrated the card at Siggraph, where Nvidia also unveiled its most powerful workstation GPU to date. The company showed the Radeon SSG rendering a raw 8K video. The initial demo showed this running at 17 frames per second, but this was boosted to over 90 frames per second using the SSG.

Raj Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect at AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, said: "One of the most challenging constraints faced by GPU computing applications is the inability to access terabytes of data.

"Radeon Pro SSG is poised to not only speed up processing for many applications with very large datasets, but to enable new application experiences by using data persistence of non-volatile memory. This will be a disruptive advance for many graphics and compute applications."

AMD's Radeon Pro SSG doesn't come cheap, though. Beta developer kits are on sale now for $9,999 (or around £7,600). A full release is planned for 2017.

AMD also unveiled a new line of workstation graphics cards based on Polaris, dubbed the Radeon Pro WX Series.

This line-up includes the WX 4100 aimed at small form-factor workstations, the WX 5100 in the middle, and the Radeon Pro WX 7100 for more demanding graphics and VR content creation.