AMD rumored to announce Smart Access Storage tech similar to Microsoft's DirectStorage at Computex

On paper, the latest NVMe tech combined with lightning fast PCIe 5.0 solutions should provide incredible SSD transfer speeds, but the software code is far from being optimized enough to take advantage of that raw potential. Microsoft intends to improve the situation with the release of the DirectStorage API for Windows and the GDC 2022 demonstration with the Forspoken game showed promising results, allowing for loading times lower than 2 seconds. However, it looks like AMD is also developing a similar technology that could be launched on its laptop platforms first, if sources close to Videocardz are correct.

Dubbed "Smart Access Storage" (SAS), Team Red’s take on DirectStorage is rumored to first be featured on Corsair’s upcoming Voyager laptop lineup, which should to be unveiled at this year’s Computex event in June. According to Videocardz, the top-of-the-line Voyager laptop specs were leaked some months ago and they include a Ryzen 9 6900HX processor coupled with the Radeon RX 6800M dGPU. Additionally, AMD CEO Lisa Su announced that the Computex keynote will include details regarding “next gen mobile and desktop PC innovations,” so more SAS details could be unveiled by that time.

Hopefully, SAS is not a mobile-only feature like AMD’s SmartShift. AMD already confirmed that the Zen 4 “Raphael” processors launching in 2H 2022 support PCIe 5.0, and if SAS is leveraging the GPU VRAM similarly to how DirectStorage works, the new AM5 platform combined with the upcoming Navi 3x RDNA3 GPUs should also allow desktop users to take advantage of this technology.

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