@rzxv04 said:
@michaelmikado said:
@rzxv04 said:
@michaelmikado said:
@rzxv04:
Not at all, the future is pretty much all 3D NAND for the foreseeable future. NVMe is still a superior yet immature, costly, and power hungry solution. It has a place in mid to high end devices which prioritize performance and it will improve substantially in the future.
Think of it like this.
Low end, low power devices = UFS
High power, expensive devices = NVMe
Thinking about it this way the PS5 will cost hundreds of dollars less than a high end PC or iPhone. It will likely have the lower tiers of next gen hardware which will still outperform much of the mid to top tier current gen hardware. None of this is a bad thing and it allows them to reduce the costs of the device later in its life rather than relying on highly niche expensive parts. Both solutions have a place. Plus if you think about it, it paves the way for something like a portable console similar to the switch in later revisions.
Forgive me but didn't you meantion that UFS 3.0 already performs close to nvm?
@michaelmikado said:
@rzxv04:
Not at all, the future is pretty much all 3D NAND for the foreseeable future. NVMe is still a superior yet immature, costly, and power hungry solution. It has a place in mid to high end devices which prioritize performance and it will improve substantially in the future.
Think of it like this.
Low end, low power devices = UFS
High power, expensive devices = NVMe
Thinking about it this way the PS5 will cost hundreds of dollars less than a high end PC or iPhone. It will likely have the lower tiers of next gen hardware which will still outperform much of the mid to top tier current gen hardware. None of this is a bad thing and it allows them to reduce the costs of the device later in its life rather than relying on highly niche expensive parts. Both solutions have a place. Plus if you think about it, it paves the way for something like a portable console similar to the switch in later revisions.
Btw what was that chart by ron that shows 220mbps while pc nvme does 1400 minimum sustained?
As for price isn't 256gb at $ 60 the more expensive compared to a lower end 1TB x4 nvme at $ 100?
If UFS really has close to nvme performance (3.2 nvme vs 2.9 ufs 3), and much cheaper, shouldn't the entire industry, including PC move towards it asap or do you think UFS controller makers would charge premiums?
It's also interesting that you did bring up that "raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PC" qualifier that makes UFS 3.0 interesting in that context but what do you think of a theoretical, very fast cache, low amount of storage system. Might require too much involvement and hassle for programmers?
Do you think Sony is somewhat being "coy/smart" that they meant they have a PCIE 4.0 in their system with a soon to be released but soon to be common mid-high end NVME that takes advantage of PCIE 4.0 in their dev kits for a few months now? Technically faster than any mass market ssds today.. but maybe common enough in late 2019 or entrance of 2020?
With anything in there are always trade-offs. UFS 3.0 has low write speeds and random reads when compared to NVMe. This makes NVMe far far far better suited in a PC environment where you do multiple things at high performance. As opposed to a cellphone, Chromebook, car driving system, where you do 1 task which is to act as a fast cache. That's why UFS 3.0 isn't suited to general PC use for mid and high-end performance. It literally does one thing very fast for very cheap and its literally to act as fast cache. The one and only benefit Sony touted. Realistically there is no reason to have very high write speeds or random reads in something that will predominantly be a linear experience only needing a cache. Further high write speeds do not make sense when download speeds and installs from blu-ray would be very low anyway. There's simple no point in paying for all the draw additional drawbacks to get benefits that you don't need or use. Remember UFS 3.0 is superior as a cheap, low power cache, not a full on PC HDD. There's no premiums for UFS 3.0 controllers because the do not have nearly as much logic built into them like NVMe.
As for the price, I was just using it as an example. Realistically a 512GB drive would likely cost something like $30-$40 for Sony. Also it isn't looking at it as value, rather it would be raw cost. A 512GB drive at $40 vs a 1TB drive at $60 is still $20 more in costs which still doesn't account for added costs of the controller, the heat solutions, and the reduction in power to the GPU, memory, or GPU. For that same $20 cost plus the controller and other costs they could get a better processor, more RAM, invest more in the GPU etc.
To kind of put this in perspective, the cost to put NVMe doesn't add much to the actually applications Sony is looking to use it as which is basically a graduated cache. As for whether they would benefit from small amounts, I originally they would have a eMMC drive between 32 and 128GB for this purpose, but since then Samsung who makes much of the PS4/5 RAM has suspiciously spun up their UFS 3.0 mass production and their minimum size I believe is 128/256GB. They still could have a custom solution which is even faster than normal and in small capacities. We just have to wait for them to officially make that claim.
Do you think there's a good chance of heavily investing into video/streamed editing built in the PS5 to make use of NVME being faster all around?
Would you happen to have figures of how much power consumption advantage UFS 3.0 has over nvme?
Do you think that nvme's heat isn't much of an issue? Would slapping small heatsinks be good enough? I don't see those slapped onto PCs yet.
Is this exaggerated?:
I can’t stress this enough – if you’re using the M.2 NVMe SSD as a boot drive and for gaming/daily use – then don’t worry, it’s really difficult to make it thermal throttle unless it’s copying files in and out continuously. It’s reallydifficult to create such a scenario.
https://nasilemaktech.com/nvme-ssd-thermal-throttling-preventions/
Just being near heatsinks seem to cool it off?
By the way where does the controller reside? Is that already part of the cheap x4 1TB $ 100 stick or would that be a separate chip on the motherboard?
In what scenario do you think the PS5 wouldn't use UFS 3.0?
One rumor was talking about Phison? How is that compared to UFS?
Any video would likely work like how the PS4 does. Actively stored in memory and transferred to disk when needed. It may be part of the needed (rumored) 4GB of RAM dedicated to the OS. There's no sense in writing any streaming content to disk especially with that much RAM.
UFS has a max of 1.68 Watts power consumption. By contrast Optane gets up to 17+ W during writes and around 10W reads. Most NVMe should be around 10W and below max though. But still 5-10x the power consumption. I would say at least 3x as much minimum.
The quote about throttling isn't exaggerated because of the way Operating Systems and Games work where they load everything into RAM in one shot and then the Disk will rest or go idle for a bit because everything is stored in memory. The reason games and OSs are made that way is because they cannot rely on fast drives to operate. Sony is planning the exact opposite as they want to use it as an active cache. Thus the specific scenario which they are saying it would actually be a problem. it’s really difficult to make it thermal throttle unless it’s copying files in and out continuously.Is the exact use Sony has planned for the PS5 drive. Its not just about load times being shorter they want to eliminate them completely by letting devs has access to continuous and reliably fast storage. You can't do that if your storage throttles itself after 30 minutes of use.
I would say the problem is that you have to cool it off to begin with. NVMe Max operating temps are 185F by contrast UFS can get to 225F. UFS could basically sit on the processor and still survive and not throttle. I don't think any console manufacturer would want to risk a red ring of death scenario again.
The controller for both is typically on the storage itself. It's important to remember that the controller is really the only thing that separates UFS 3.0 from NVMe, as its just the interface. Both use Flash NAND and the interfaces just prioritize two different methods to access it. That said UFS 3.0 also has an embedded solution which would allow you to drop multiple block of Flash NAND directly on the board without working about PCI-E channels and busses. For both you would need the actually connectors and busses and m.2 is small but not smaller than UFS because one is obviously designed for mobile and is more limited.
I have no idea if they actually would use UFS or not, but if I was making a console that's the one I would chose for all the listed reasons. In order for it to be viable it would need to 1) outperform UFS 2) be cheaper than UFS 3) run cooler and less power than UFS. Which by the time you get to this point on costs with NVMe you are failing in both performance and power. As an example the link to the crucial NVMe storage in the other link has a max of 2GBps. When you reduce costs or power on NVMe you lose performance making it worse than UFS on sequential reads which is what you actually need. If you increase performance you pay too much and it runs to hot and ends up getting throttled back down anyway.
I could see them using NVMe if they just weren't able to workout anything better on the business end.
Yeah I heard about the Phison controller at computex or something. Don't get me wrong they make excellent controllers and theirs will be something to see, but at the end of the day its going to be high-end in price and power so it wouldn't work for a console. The main consideration is balancing the solutions.
Here is what I would do if I were Sony:
UFS 3.0 is merely a standard. And the standard was developed to enhance performance in low power scenarios, hence the very low wattage. Sony could easily work with a company to use the same chips but a modified UFS 3.0 controller which doubles power consumption placing in the realm of a low power NVMe and easily exceed 4/5GBps. Alternatively, the controllers are cheap because UFS mostly scales linearly. NVMe has more advanced logic built into the controller hence why they perform better. UFS by contrast is pretty dumb and requires slightly more cpu resources to management. Sony is rumored to have developed an advanced memory logic system to automate this process (Also why NVMe would be redundant). Sony, in theory could drop multiple UFS 3.0 blocks on the board instead. A 128GB block would likely be around $10-$15. They could drop 4 of these, have 512GB of storage with each 128GB block having its own 2.9GBps of bandwidth and let its memory management system sort out the caching. This is all hypothetical of course so don't assume anything like that would happen, but a solution like that would technically be leagues better than anything on PC at the moment.
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