The Korean company shows its new CXL drives in the face of the arrival of AMD Genoa and Intel Sapphire Rapids.
Samsung has announced its SSDs with semantic memory to provide-according to the company. 20 times higher performance (and lower latency) compared to a conventional solid state drive. The key to this type of memory is that it combines the ability to access the persistent memory of an SSD with the transfer speed of DRAM.. This is how the MRAM memory that will be used by these SSDs along with the CXL connections was born.
The PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 interfaces provide very high sequential read/write speeds and RAM performance, but it is not sufficient for applications that perform artificial intelligence or machine learning. That is where the need for memory that is tailored to these very specific tasks comes in. AI and ML typically process very large data setsbut they do so piecemeal with light files. This is why the SSDs used by data centers, which work best by performing mixed tasks, do not offer the best performance with the tasks we are talking about..
Precisely for this reason, Samsung has developed these semantic memories, which. combine voluminous DRAM cachesNAND storage and PCI3 Gen5 interfaces with CXL technology. This enables applications to write data to the DRAM cache at such high speeds with a minimal latency thanks to the CXL protocol. Then, the in-house controllers take care of transferring the data to the NAND memory. This is how those superior performances are achieved.
Unfortunately, little is known about the type of DRAM, NAND or controllers. that will be used by these MRAM SSDs. This is normal, because it will be the next-generation equipment, such as AMD Genoa and Intel Sapphire Rapids, that can exploit the CXL technology; with this, Samsung will not be able to talk in detail about performance figures. Obviously, we are talking about professional storage units, such as this SSD with vapor chamber, but if this new technology can teach us anything, it is that there is still much to evolve in terms of storage.
