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NVIDIA and its partners are advancing towards a new phase of ‘AI memory.’ According to a recent report by Nikkei, Kioxia plans to develop commercial SSDs that will be 100 times faster than traditional ones.
NVIDIA’s Plans to Replace HBM with Faster SSD Solutions
NVIDIA seems to be considering alternatives for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) technology. The company aims to improve conventional SSDs to match or surpass the performance of modern HBM solutions. Based on a report by Nikkei, Kioxia is partnering with NVIDIA to develop AI-specific SSDs that could offer 100 times faster speeds than traditional SSDs and potentially replace HBM.
NVIDIA targets achieving 200 million Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) with the solution. To achieve this, Kioxia will likely use two 100 million IOPS-capable SSDs in tandem. The design involves a PCIe 7.0 connection to meet NVIDIA’s speed requirements. This project necessitates a ‘rework’ from scratch to replace HBM with an SSD-like solution. Kioxia has hinted at the development of High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) technology, which could be crucial for this initiative.
HBF addresses the limitations of NAND memory and offers significantly higher capacities. SanDisk originally developed HBF to address these issues. The key advantage is its ability to scale up to terabytes of memory per device, which could revolutionize AI data centers by providing large pools of memory for inferencing workloads.
It is fascinating to see the industry moving beyond HBM and embracing new solutions. NAND technology appears set to play a significant role in future AI memory advancements.
