> Built for laptops with soldered memory and no upgrade path. If you have an RTX card sitting there with 8GB of VRAM and you're getting swapped to SSD, this puts that VRAM to work.
Well, that does at least answer my immediate question about why I would ever swap from expensive RAM to really expensive RAM:) Feels niche, but when you want it it's a good idea.
Remember how 16GBs used to be an enterprise level database mainframe?
Well, GPUs also have stupid amounts of compute on them. I have to imagine that there is some kind of database format that's useful with GPU compute attached.
Since the data is already in VRAM, the GPU can sort, join, or otherwise manipulate data as needed.
They already do that on windows and it kinda sucks. If you are targeting something like LMStudio or ComfyUI, both of those have superior methods to do exactly this.
Wouldn't it be faster to swap to vram if you are sitting there with 8gigs of it unused than swapping to ssd and burning its write cycles, assuming you absolutely need swap
Well, that does at least answer my immediate question about why I would ever swap from expensive RAM to really expensive RAM:) Feels niche, but when you want it it's a good idea.
>Sequential throughput: ~1.3 GB/s
[on a RTX 3070 Laptop]
This RTX 3070 chip is on PCIe 4.0 x16 which should give 64GB/s. The 8GB of GDDR6 is 448GB/s.
Swapping to an NVMe drive would be twice as fast, but with higher latency.
Now if it could be dynamically used and vacated on other GPU workloads?
Well, GPUs also have stupid amounts of compute on them. I have to imagine that there is some kind of database format that's useful with GPU compute attached.
Since the data is already in VRAM, the GPU can sort, join, or otherwise manipulate data as needed.