Almost all the major makers of solid-state memory and storage participated in the 2023 FMS in Santa Clara, CA in early August. This is the first of a few articles covering announcements and keynote talks at the event. In addition to the keynote talks there was a full day of tutorial talks on Monday and many parallel sessions and a large exhibit hall from Tuesday through Thursday. First we will look at announcements by Kioxia and Samsung.
Kioxia talked about their recently introduced BiCS 8th generation 218-layer NAND flash product which increases storage density by 50% from the prior Gen 6 product, provides 20% faster program performance, 10% lower read latency and 30% better read and program power efficiency. Data transfer rates also increase 60% from 2,000 to 3,200 Mbps. This generation also includes creating separate logic and memory wafers and then bonding them together rather than manufacturing logic and memory on the same wafer. This is a method pioneered by YMTC with their NAND flash.
Kioxia said that it is doubling it’s SSD performance with each PCIe generation. Kioxia also said that it would reduce its energy consumption in making 1 GB of memory by 50% from 2017 to 2025 (this may mostly follow the increase in bit density).
Kioxia also talked about its strategy with CXL and NAND flash. They believe that higher CLX storage density using flash memory allows for less data transfers and increased processing efficiency for applications such as AI. The company suggested two solutions as shown in the figure below.
BiCS flash with CXL can provide read intensive high capacity memory while CXL with XL-Flash offers a combination of single level (SL) and two level (ML) flash memory for more write intensive applications. A Cachelib simulation for CXL with XL-Flash provided a 5X improvement in performance.
Kioxia also talked about more powerful SoCs on their enterprise SSDs can allow offloading RAID functions (e.g. copy and parity calculations) to the SSD with Gen 5 PCIe, freeing up a CPU. They say this technology can complement existing hardware and software RAID solutions.
The company also announced and was demonstrating in their booth, a ruler sized software enabled flash SSD, which allows sophisticated programming of their SSDs providing total host control with an open-source API. Kioxia is looking for partners and vendors for this technology. The figure below shows a concept for enabling future AI inference that allows customization of results using private and confidential data in flash memory.
Kioxia was also showing HPE space born servers on the ISS using their SSDs that demonstrate reduced latency for space-based operations using locale processing and storage.
Samsung’s keynote addressed the need for faster and larger memory and storage for AI-based data centers. They suggested an expansion of the current memory and storage hierarchy to include high bandwidth memory (HBM), memory-semantic SSDs and petabyte-scale SSDs (PBSSDs).
Samsung said that they made SSDs for all segments of the consumer market as shown below.
Samsung was showing its 990 PRO SSD targeted at gamers and creative workflows. Another drive was the PM9C1a PC storage SSD. They also showed their history of memory solutions for automotive applications and their latest PFS 3.1 product as shown below. This product supports zonal-control automotive computing providing shared storage, high random performance and a detachable form-factor storage module that was available in the Samsung exhibit.
The company announced the following data center products at the show. The PM1743 is intended for use in generative AI servers with 16 channel PCIE 5.0 support and 2X improved power efficiency. The PM9D3a is a PCIe 5.0 SSD for data centers with an 8-channel controller that improves prior generation sequential read performance by up to 2.3X and random write performance by more than 2X.
An 8TB drive provides 400k IOPS and provides a 60% power efficiency improvement. MTBF is 2.5M hours. It is available in a 2.5-inch standard-sized product with capacities up to 15.36TB. Additional form factor products with capacities as low as 3.84TB and up to 30.72TB are expected in the first half of 2024.
They were also showing a quad level cell (QLC) NAND 256TB SSD, see below, which the company says consumes about seven times less power for the same storage capacity as eight 32TB SSDs. In the exhibit area Samsung was showing its PBSSD architecture. This provides petabyte-scale solutions that provide scale using capacity variations that depend upon the application. Samsung said that they will unveil their first prototype PBSSD applications in October 2023.
Samsung also discussed its multi-tenancy architecture to maintain storage performance by implementing traffic isolation so that even when multiple users use a single SSD, each virtual machine (VM) occupies only its pre-allocated bandwidth and doesn’t interfere with the operation of other VMs. With Meta, they also discussed flexible data placement with Samsung SSDs.
Samsung’s CXL-based memory-semantic SSDs are targeted at AI systems (see image below). The company said that using this product provided better DRAM utilization and enabled larger memory capacity at lower TCO.
Samsung also had guest talks by Paul Turner from VMware and Pablo Ziperovich from Microsoft.
At the 2023 FMS Kioxia announced higher density NAND flash using denser memory columns and the use of bonded logic and memory wafers. They also talked about their NAND-based CXL products and were showing their Software Enabled Flash. Samsung also had CXL products with their memory-semantic SSDs as well as 256TB QLC SSDs and a petabyte-scale SSD initiative as well as new consumer, automotive and data center SSDs.
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