Kioxia has confirmed it’s working with Nvidia on a brand new class of solid-state drives designed to hit 100 million random IOPS as early as 2027, in accordance with Nikkei. Nvidia reportedly plans to attach a number of items on to its GPUs, successfully doubling throughput to 200 million IOPS for AI programs.
Koichi Fukuda, CTO of Kioxia’s SSD division, mentioned the corporate will proceed with improvement in step with Nvidia’s specs, underscoring that these drives are being tailor-made particularly for AI workloads. Particularly, Workforce Inexperienced’s curiosity in 100 million IOPS SSDs has been mentioned since earlier this yr, whereas Kioxia has already revealed plans for AI SSDs able to 10 million IOPS in 2026 primarily based on its XL-Flash expertise.
These efforts spotlight the distinctive storage necessities of AI. Coaching and inference workloads rely closely on frequent, small random reads — usually on 512-byte blocks — to retrieve embeddings, mannequin weights, and database entries. Whereas 512B operations might not supply the bandwidth of 4K blocks, they’re higher suited to latency-sensitive duties.
The large query is how Kioxia intends to ship 100 million IOPS. XL-Flash, a single-level cell NAND with greater endurance and decrease latency than standard 3D NAND, is a possible basis. Estimates recommend reaching that determine might require practically a thousand dies, a configuration that will demand multi-controller designs or unconventional architectures to beat scaling limits.
One other risk is excessive bandwidth flash (HBF), which stacks NAND dies with a logic layer utilizing TSVs to maximise parallelism. Whereas not formally confirmed, HBF might present the type of breakthrough wanted for this challenge.
Whether or not Kioxia pursues XL-Flash, HBF, or a hybrid method, the event indicators a shift in how storage and compute will work together in AI programs. By attaching ultra-fast SSDs on to GPUs, Nvidia goals to speed up entry to the large datasets driving fashionable AI fashions.
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