Fadu's FC5161 SSD Controller Breaks Cover in Western Digital's PCIe Gen5 Enterprise Drives
When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions.
PCI-SIG Demonstrates PCIe 6.0 Interoperability at FMS 2024
As the deployment of PCIe 5.0 picks up steam in both datacenter and consumer markets, PCI-SIG is not sitting idle, and is already working on getting the ecosystem ready for the updats to the PCIe specifications. At FMS 2024, some vendors were even talking about PCIe 7.0 with its 128 GT/s capabilities despite PCIe 6.0 not even starting to ship yet. We caught up with PCI-SIG to get some updates on its activities and have a discussion on
DapuStor and Memblaze Target Global Expansion with State-of-the-Art Enterprise SSDs
The growth in the enterprise SSD (eSSD) market has outpaced that of the client SSD market over the last few years. The requirements of AI servers for both training and inference has been the major impetus in this front. In addition to the usual vendors like Samsung, Solidigm, Micron, Kioxia, and Western Digital serving the cloud service providers (CSPs) and the likes of Facebook, a number of companies have been at work inside China to service the burgeoning eSSD market within.
In our coverage of the Microchip Flashtec
Phison Enterprise SSDs at FMS 2024: Pascari Branding and Accelerating AI
At FMS 2024, Phison devoted significant booth space to their enterprise / datacenter SSD and PCIe retimer solutions, in addition to their consumer products . As a controller / silicon vendor, Phison had historically been working with drive partners to bring their solutions to the market. On the enterprise side, their tie-up with Seagate for the X1 series (and the subsequent Nytro-branded enterprise SSDs) is quite well-known. Seagate supplied the requirements list and had a say in the final firmware before qualifying
Intel Sells Its Arm Shares, Reduces Stakes in Other Companies
Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.
The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls
Earlier this month, AMD launched the first two desktop CPUs using their latest Zen 5 microarchitecture: the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 5 9600X. As part of the new Ryzen 9000 family, it gave us their latest Zen 5 cores to the desktop market, as AMD actually launched Zen 5 through their mobile platform last month, the Ryzen AI 300 series (which we reviewed).
Today, AMD is launching the remaining two Ryzen 9000
G.Skill Intros Low Latency DDR5 Memory Modules: CL30 at 6400 MT/s
G.Skill on Tuesday introduced its ultra-low-latency DDR5-6400 memory modules that feature a CAS latency of 30 clocks, which appears to be the industry's most aggressive timings yet for DDR5-6400 sticks. The modules will be available for both AMD and Intel CPU-based systems.
With every new generation of DDR memory comes an increase in data transfer rates and an extension of relative latencies. While for the vast majority of applications, the increased bandwidth
Samsung's 128 TB-Class BM1743 Enterprise SSD Displayed at FMS 2024
Samsung had quietly launched its BM1743 enterprise QLC SSD last month with a hefty 61.44 TB SKU. At FMS 2024, the company had the even larger 122.88 TB version of that SSD on display, alongside a few recorded benchmarking sessions. Compared to the previous generation, the BM1743 comes with a 4.1x improvement in I/O performance, improvement in data retention, and a 45% improvement in power efficiency
Kioxia Demonstrates Optical Interface SSDs for Data Centers
A few years back, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO ) allocated funding for the development of green datacenter technologies. With the aim to obtain up to 40% savings in overall power consumption, several Japanese companies have been developing an optical interface for their enterprise SSDs. And at this year's FMS, Kioxia had their optical interface on display.
Silicon Motion Demonstrates Flexible Data Placement on MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform
At FMS 2024, the technological requirements from the storage and memory subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors had various demonstrations touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data pipeline - ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference. Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors have taken advantage of one of the features introduced recently in the NVM Express standard - Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
FDP involves the