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[Mudkips]

PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep. 6, 2012-- Dataram Corporation [NASDAQ: DRAM], a leading international manufacturer of computer memory, storage and software products, announced today that it has entered into a formal agreement with AMD (NYSE: AMD) to develop an AMD-branded version of Dataram DRAM’s popular RAMDisk software. Dataram will market the product under the name Radeon RAMDisk and will target gaming enthusiasts seeking exponential improvements in game load times leading to an enhanced gaming experience. AMD intends to offer special Radeon RAMDisk incentives for those purchasing AMD Value, Entertainment, Performance and Radeon Edition memory products.

With over four million downloads of RAMDisk occurring since its launch in 2000, Dataram’s RAMDisk software is recognized as a leader in the RAM drive software market. In addition to being used extensively by gaming enthusiasts, the software is also widely used for accelerating database access, speeding up internet browsing, substantially reducing video rendering times, reducing wear on SSDs and reducing software development cycles.

RAMDisk use has recently stirred great interest and expanded into corporate environments for accelerating specific applications and is being integrated into other commercially available products for which performance is critical. Quality and reliability, a hallmark of Dataram’s enterprise-grade memory products, is a key characteristic of its RAMDisk software that contributes to its exceptional recognition in the market.

“Dataram RAMDisk is one of the top RAMDisk software products in the Windows market. With the increase in memory capacity and reduced cost per gigabyte, now is the best time ever to utilize DRAM to create a lightning fast disk drive. Like all Dataram products, we have not only focused on speed and value, we have applied years of experience with data protection and reliability,” said Jason Caulkins, Dataram Chief Technologist.

Various benchmarks have shown that using RAMDisk results in up to 525% faster game load times, substantially improving the gaming experience. Used in conjunction with AMD memory products, gaming enthusiasts can gain distinct advantages when competing against their fellow gamers. Commenting on the launch of the AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk product in early fourth quarter, Roman Kyrychynskyi, Product Director at AMD said, “With the importance that memory plays in the overall PC experience, eliminating bottlenecks is crucial for avid PC gamers. Our collaboration with Dataram looks to provide the answer with an enhanced storage solution that reduces possible performance plateaus and provide a superior PC gaming experience."

As RAMDisk continues to gain rapid consumer and commercial recognition, focus will be applied to rolling out the strategic product roadmap for RAMDisk. Particular focus will be directed towards expanding those markets that have already adopted and recognized the value of using Dataram’s RAMDisk.

It's been ages since I've seen anyone talk about RAM disks outside of very specialized applications. With memory prices so low (8 GB DDR 3 for $35 retail), it could be interesting to see what comes out of this. And since this is a software solution you'd be able to use system memory, not just an add-in card attached via the PCIe bus. Shit from Fusion-IO (http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive2/ http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive-octal/) has insane performance already, but if you remove the limitations of the PCIe bus, you'd have even higher bandwidth and even lower latency, and you wouldn't have the added costs of an additional memory controller and an enclosure.

I'd love to be able to slap in 8x8 GB of RAM into my PC, launch Max Payne 3, and then have software magically split my system memory into 32/32 and load the entire game to the RAM disk. I've got 2 Crucial M4's in RAID 0 and I love the speed, but a RAM disk would be many times faster. I have 16 GB of RAM right now, and it pisses me off that Windows doesn't allocate more of it to processes that need it. So many applications are still 32-bit and limited to 2 GB private set.

 

[Hari Seldon]

That would be interesting to try, especially if AMD bundles this capability in their catalyst software.

 

[The Abominable Snowman]

Sounds quite amazing, actually. Hope this becomes the standard in top-end games and systems

But whats the big difference, hardware-wise, between this and installing 32+GB RAM? Shouldnt there be a software tweak for utilizing that extra RAM also?

 

[Mudkips]

That would be interesting to try, especially if AMD bundles this capability in their catalyst software.

That's basically what I'm thinking would happen.

Future AMD CPUs ("APUs") would have a memory controller that has some DATARam code in there, and you could configure a default amount of RAM to be used as a disk UEFI. Catalyst Control Center could dynamically adjust the split and load shit into the RAM disk based on a profile for whatever application you're launching. The CPU and memory controller could make the change transparent to the operating system (typically changing the amount of memory allocated requires a reboot).

But whats the big difference, hardware-wise, between this and installing 32+GB RAM? Shouldnt there be a software tweak for utilizing that extra RAM also?

Under Windows, individual processes are limited to a certain maximum amount of private memory. On 64-bit editions of Windows, it's 2 GB for processes that aren't compiled as large address aware, 4 GB for 32-bit processes that are large address aware, and 8 TB for 64-bit processes that are large address aware.
Even if you're dealing with a proper 64-bit application, the memory manager gets in the way. The process will have 8 TB of private address space, but that doesn't correlate to 8 TB of physical RAM. The memory manager sits in the middle and decides how much physical memory to dole out to each process, flushes out unused pages to disk after a while, etc. Having data sit on a RAM disk would ensure that even if shit is constrained or flushed to disk by the memory manager, access to that data is nearly as fast as if it were still in system memory.

 

[HoosTrax]

Without a source of backup power, the data would be lost each time you turned off your computer, would it not. So every time you turned your computer back on, you'd have to reload the game into the RAMdisk since it's a software solution.

Or do I misunderstand.

 

[Hari Seldon]

That's basically what I'm thinking would happen.

Future AMD CPUs ("APUs") would have a memory controller that has some DATARam code in there, and you could configure a default amount of RAM to be used as a disk UEFI. Catalyst Control Center could dynamically adjust the split and load shit into the RAM disk based on a profile for whatever application you're launching. The CPU and memory controller could make the change transparent to the operating system (typically changing the amount of memory allocated requires a reboot).

That sounds pretty amazing. And being that AMD is rumored to be on the hook for the PS4 and 720, I wonder if they will somehow work this into the console space also.

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

That sounds pretty amazing. And being that AMD is rumored to be on the hook for the PS4 and 720, I wonder if they will somehow work this into the console space also.

lol

 

[tokkun]

Without a source of backup power, the data would be lost each time you turned off your computer, would it not. So every time you turned your computer back on, you'd have to reload the game into the RAMdisk since it's a software solution.

Or do I misunderstand.

That's correct. So although you save some loading time while in-game, you'll need several minutes of loading at launch time to copy the files over to the RAM disk.

Non-volatile memory like phase-change memory should be cost-competitive in 3 years or so, which would make for a more attractive RAM disk option, but hopefully by then most new games will be running on engines that support 64-bit addressing directly. Frostbite is already supposed to be 64-bit only by next year.

 

[Mudkips]

That sounds pretty amazing. And being that AMD is rumored to be on the hook for the PS4 and 720, I wonder if they will somehow work this into the console space also.

Seriously doubt it. You need buttloads of RAM for this to be useful. And a closed system such as a game console which has very little multitasking would already have a memory manager tuned to loading as much of the game into memory as possible, and keeping it there. On a PC with a foll-blown OS, there's good reason for the memory manager to police processes fairly aggressively. Additionally, one of RAM disk's main benefits is to preload data that will be used frequently. Current consoles already try to intelligently pull from (optical) disc to (hard) disk and RAM simultaneously, and from (hard) disk to RAM when available. They can do this more aggressively than PCs because of the fixed nature of the device - you can precisely tune your application to take advantage X amount of storage and Y amount of RAM.

Without a source of backup power, the data would be lost each time you turned off your computer, would it not. So every time you turned your computer back on, you'd have to reload the game into the RAMdisk since it's a software solution.

Or do I misunderstand.

No, you have it right. It would be used for shit you flush to secondary storage when done or for shit you only need to read (like game textures, a source video file, whatever). Every time you boot up you'd have to recopy data into the RAM disk, so a longer initial load, but no loading after that. Of course, integration with AMD means a lot of this can be hidden away. As soon as you launch your game the driver could load up a profile, find out what files the game uses, and intercept IO requests to that file. The driver and memory controller then talk to eachother and split the physical RAM into system memory and RAM disk without the OS throwing a fit and without losing any data that doesn't fit in the new, reduced system memory partition. Then every game file is loaded into the RAM disk, any IO request for a game file takes priority, and is loaded from secondary storage (HDD, SSD, optical disc) and inserted into the RAM disk. This way when you launch a game and load the menu, you're not slowed down by the driver and memory controller trying to copy all 27 GB of Max Payne from disk to RAM disk. As you play the game, idle IO time is used to copy game files that haven't been requested yet, so when you get to the next level they're already on the RAM disk.

 

[phosphor112]

I'm not understanding.. how does this work? I know how virtual memory works... on the HDD, right? How does that make it faster if it has to spin up/down anyway?

 

[Pagusas]

I'm not understanding.. how does this work? I know how virtual memory works... on the HDD, right? How does that make it faster if it has to spin up/down anyway?

Youd be basically loading your game into system memory, just not the memory on the mainboard, rather memory thats on a PCI-E card thats being seen by the computer as another hard drive. This memory would be almost as fast as the system memory and would basically give you instant load times. The problem is that it requires constant power to hold its state, so when the power goes off, it all reverts back to its initial state. So you'd use it as a very large, very fast Cache basically. With some sofware you could tell the computer "load all of Max Payne 3 into this super fast memory when I launch the game". Or for me, I'd have it load all my video and photo editing software at startup so I could instantly launch photoshop/premiere/after effects.

 

[phosphor112]

Youd be basically loading your game into system memory, just not the memory on the mainboard, rather memory thats on a PCI-E card thats being seen by the computer as another hard drive. This memory would be almost as fast as the system memory and would basically give you instant load times. The problem is that it requires constant power to hold its state, so when the power goes off, it all reverts back to its initial state. So you'd use it as a very large, very fast Cache basically. With some sofware you could tell the computer "load all of Max Payne 3 into this super fast memory when I launch the game". Or for me, I'd have it load all my video and photo editing software at startup so I could instantly launch photoshop/premiere/after effects.

OOOOooooo, ok, so that's where those ioDrive things come in.

 

[HoosTrax]

OOOOooooo, ok, so that's where those ioDrive things come in.

It sounds like ioDrive uses Flash-based memory though, whereas this is based on DRAM (volatile memory). I guess that's how they get away with not having a battery on the card.

 

[Syriel]

Without a source of backup power, the data would be lost each time you turned off your computer, would it not. So every time you turned your computer back on, you'd have to reload the game into the RAMdisk since it's a software solution.

Or do I misunderstand.

This particular software has the option to dump the RAMdisk to drive on shutdown (and restore it on bootup).

4GB version is free.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

If you have enough RAM and want a larger disk than that, it's ~$20 USD.

Paid ver supports disks up to 64GB.

 

[Mandoric]

What are the advantages of this over the (extremely aggressive) cacheing Windows does anyway? More user control over prioritization and predictive loads?

 

[Rentahamster]

Good to see ramdisk applications getting more love.

 

[Syriel]

What are the advantages of this over the (extremely aggressive) cacheing Windows does anyway? More user control over prioritization and predictive loads?

Everything is in RAM. All the time. Always.

Fastest "disk" access possible.

Primary use is going to be software with heavy disk I/O (databases, web servers, etc.).

In games, it'll likely mostly impact loading times as many games are designed to load the current area into memory when you start a level.

 

[tokkun]

What are the advantages of this over the (extremely aggressive) cacheing Windows does anyway? More user control over prioritization and predictive loads?

I think that pretty much hits the nail on the head.

 

[Syriel]

AMD has officially launched the "branded" version:

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2012/10/10/give-your-pc-a-boost-with-amd-radeon-ramdisk/

 

[amrod]

hopefully some site with benchmark games loading with it and without