AMD is developing Smart Access Storage technology
Microsoft offers a storage technology called DirectStorage on the Xbox Series X/S game consoles released in 2020, which let the NVMe SSD bypass the CPU and memory and transfer data directly to the video memory to greatly reduce the game loading time, and solve the problem of some material loading errors so allowing the game to achieve seamless integration of scenes. This year, Microsoft officially moved DirectStorage to Windows to improve the loading speed of PC games.
According to VideoCardz, AMD is developing a new technology called Smart Access Storage (SAS). The reputation of Smart Access Storage sounds similar to AMD’s previous Smart Access Memory (SAM), but SAS is for storage performance and SAM is for graphics performance.
Smart Access Storage is rumored to make an appearance on Corsair Voyager laptops soon, though details on the technology are not yet available. This is CORSAIR’s first gaming notebook, which is said to be a 3A platform equipped with AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU and Radeon RX 6800M GPU, which is consistent with the hardware configuration of the previously exposed “Xenomorph” laptop. CORSAIR plans to launch the gaming laptop in June, which means there could be news about Smart Access Storage during the Computex 2022 keynote.
It is understood that AMD’s Smart Access Storage may reference Microsoft’s DirectStorage API in some way. At the GDC conference in March of this year, Microsoft demonstrated the application of DirectStorage on the Windows platform through the adventure game “Forspoken” being developed by Square Enix, which is also the first PC game using DirectStorage technology.
