Why it issues: A RAM drive is historically conceived as a block of unstable reminiscence “formatted” for use as a secondary storage disk drive. RAM disks are extraordinarily quick in comparison with HDDs and even SSDs, however somebody was in a position to go even past what the quickest stable storage expertise can presently obtain at this level.
A resourceful consumer was in a position to flip the tiny 3D cache reminiscence constructed by AMD in its newest client processors right into a secondary, albeit puny storage unit. This peculiar “RAM disk” turned out to be extraordinarily quick, however the methodology to create it is not easy because it requires some trial-and-error work.
AMD launched its 3D V-Cache expertise in 2022, with a brand new packaging resolution that stacks further layers of cache reminiscence on prime of the CPU. The advanced engineering work gives the processor with a bigger quantity of L3 cache, which is in fact slower than L1 and L2 cache however nonetheless adequate to provide Ryzen 7 CPUs a efficiency benefit over the competitors.
The power to show AMD’s 3D V-Cache into an impossibly quick RAM drive was first discovered in February by a consumer that goes by the moniker Nemez on X/Twitter. The consumer exploited OSFMount‘s potential to mount native disk picture recordsdata and create RAM disks, making CrystalDiskMark run throughout the newly created digital drive with “very particular settings.”
The L3 cache drive created by Nemez on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU had simply 96MB of cupboard space, however it was quick sufficient to attain learn/write speeds of 182 GBps/175 GBps. Nemez lately made some further tests, attaining much more “puzzling” outcomes with the cache drive’s insanely quick information throughput.
In response to PassMark Software program, the corporate that created OSFMount and different free benchmark packages like OSForensics, the cache drive created by Nemez is formally the “quickest RAM drive” accessible in software program so far. As different customers on X/Twitter at the moment are highlighting, the RAM disk creation methodology would not all the time work and it could actually yield inconsistent outcomes.
Nemez found that RAM disks created with OSFMount can obtain unprecedented information switch charges, however AMD’s 3D V-Cache could be even faster when used for its supposed objective. First-generation 3D V-Cache is nice sufficient for a 2 TB/s peak throughput, AMD states, whereas information bandwidth is even increased (2.5 TB/s) on the second-generation variant of the expertise.
