Kioxia might not be a household name for many PC enthusiasts, but the company is synonymous with “fast storage” in the server and datacenter world. The technologists at the Japanese multinational have been hard at work and came up with a prototype of a flash memory module (think of an SSD of sorts) that marries high capacity and serious bandwidth and speed.
The new bit of kit has a capacity of 5 TB, but can transfer data in and out at a theoretical maximum of a whopping 64 GB/s. Remember that this is just for the one module, so can you do the math for ganging-up multiple of these in an massive storage array. Predictably, the interface of choice is PCIe 6.0. Perhaps as importantly as the raw performance figures, Kioxia states that the module should consume less than 40 Watts, an important metric for power-hungry datacenters looking to maintain a greener footprint.
In order to get these speeds, Kioxia’s engineers wired up one flash controller per memory module, and connected the modules together in a daisy-chain configuration. According to the company, this makes it easier to add more memory-and-controller pairs without degrading overall bandwidth. Instead of using the parallel signaling between controllers, Kioxia cut down on power requirements and improved signal integrity by using PAM4 (four voltage levels, for two bits’ worth of data), for a total of 128 Gbps — probably per controller. Each controller also improves read latencies by prefetching data, presumably with some amount of internal cache. Improvements to signal handling yield 4 Gbps between each controller and its flash module.
As with most press releases of this type, Kioxia states that this flash module is ready to power most any number of applications, though there’s little question the first customers out of the gate will be large AI datacenters.
