AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology has been announced by the company for Ryzen 5000 processors. Many did not know if this technology would end up reaching older architecture processors. Well, finally the AMD Ryzen 3000 processors and previous Ryzen families will not have support for AMD SAM. So SAM technology will be exclusive to Ryzen 5000 processors.
Note that AMD SAM is simply the Resizable Base-Adress Registrer (Re-Size BAR) technology developed by PCI-SIG. Allows the processor to use all of the graphics VRAM memory instead of the previous 256MB limitation. In the case of the Ryzen 5000 they add a physical layer called '_pdep_u32 / 64' of full speed, which is needed for Re-Size BAR to work.
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AMD Ryzen 3000 and earlier processors will not support AMD SAM
Although this technology is not new, it is the first time that it has been used to obtain performance improvements. The curious thing of all is that Intel Haswell (4th Gen) processors already supported Re-Size BAR, but it has never been used. This support was introduced by Intel with the implementation of the 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes.
Interestingly, AMD processors will only support SAM from the Ryzen 5000 family. What we don't know is because Intel has never enabled its use. Any Intel processor from 2014 onwards can precisely support Re-Size BAR technology. It seems that motherboard manufacturers have never seen fit to support this interesting technology.
NVIDIA, for its part, would be working on adding support for Re-Size BAR on its graphics cards. Being a technology developed by PCI-SIG, anyone who relies on this protocol can use it without problems. What we do not know is if NVIDIA simply integrated Re-Size BAR or developed something that adds some additional functionality.
[irp]Source: TPU
