Kioxia introduces liquid-cooled PCIe 6.0 SSDs for AI servers
Kioxia has announced its first PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSD series. The new KIOXIA CM10 drives use the company’s 332-layer BiCS FLASH generation 10 TLC memory and target enterprise servers and AI infrastructure.
The CM10 series will be available in E3.S, E1.S and 2.5-inch form factors. Capacities range from 1.60TB to 61.44TB, depending on the model and form factor. Kioxia will offer read-intensive variants rated for one drive write per day and mixed-use models rated for three drive writes per day.
Up to 92% faster sequential reads
Kioxia claims the CM10 delivers up to 92% higher sequential read performance and up to 85% higher random read performance than the previous CM9 series. The company has not yet provided complete transfer speed or IOPS specifications.
The E3.S and 9.5mm E1.S models support direct cold-plate liquid cooling. They can also operate with conventional air cooling. Kioxia says the liquid-cooled designs are intended for dense AI systems where SSD performance and thermal limits can affect server configuration.
The drives support PCIe 6.0, NVMe 2.1 and parts of the Open Compute Project Datacenter NVMe SSD Specification 2.7. They also support NVMe Flexible Data Placement. Security options include self-encrypting drives, planned FIPS 140-3 models, SPDM 1.4 attestation and post-quantum cryptography recommended under CNSA 2.0.
Designed for NVIDIA CMX architecture
Kioxia says the CM10 series supports NVIDIA CMX architecture, which uses flash storage to extend the available memory hierarchy beyond GPU memory. The drives are aimed at AI inference and context cache storage for models with large parameter counts and longer context windows.
The 2.5-inch CM10 is an exception within the range. This model uses a PCIe 5.0 interface and older BiCS FLASH generation 8 TLC memory rather than PCIe 6.0 and generation 10 NAND.
Kioxia is currently sampling CM10 drives to selected customers.
Source: Kioxia .
