AMD is collaborating with Intel and Nvidia on Smart Access Memory

When AMD unveiled the latest generation of graphics cards in the Radeon RX 6000 series, Smart Access Memory (SAM) was one of the big news in terms of functionality. With SAM, the company gives the processor the opportunity to access larger parts of the graphics card’s memory than was previously available. At launch, only the combination of Ryzen 5000 processors and graphics cards in the Radeon RX 6000 series is supported, and hardware from other companies cannot use the feature.

This looks set to change in the future, as AMD in an interview with PCWorld (Youtube) says that the Radeon group is collaborating with Intel on support for Smart Access Memory on the latter company’s processors and associated motherboards. Furthermore, AMD says that the Ryzen group within the company is collaborating with Nvidia to enable Ryzen processors to reach larger memory segments on Geforce graphics cards.

In the interview, AMD also mentions that support for Smart Access Memory requires a considerable amount of development work and optimization to achieve good performance. This suggests that the support is not close in time, and it remains to be seen how the performance gains with mixed hardware stand up to a pure array of AMD hardware. In talks with SweClockers, AMD has previously confirmed that Smart Access Memory is limited to Ryzen 5000 series processors and Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, and there are currently no plans to support older hardware.

Nvidia recently announced that the company is also working on Smart Access Memory-like support for the company’s graphics cards in the Geforce RTX 3000 series, which will be added in an upcoming update of the associated drivers. Intel has not yet unveiled similar plans for graphics cards on the Xe architecture, but as dedicated graphics cards for desktops have not yet been launched, it is a support that may be added later.

Smart Access Memory as a function uses part of the PCI Express specification, which increases the amount of graphics memory the processor can reach per call. As it includes collaboration between processor, graphics card and motherboard, support needs to be available for all components. Those who want to mix hardware from different suppliers will thus see support for this in the future, but those who want to use Smart Access Memory today must stick to AMD’s hardware of the latest cut.

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