Kioxia Unveils Cutting-Edge CD9P PCIe 5 SSDs To Fuel AI And HPC Workloads
Kioxia is demonstrating some prototype storage solutions built around its 8th generation BiCS Flash memory featuring CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology, which the company is billing as a breakthrough architecture for data center SSDs. Called the CD9P series, these PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage solutions promise to significantly boost power efficiency, performance, and storage density with double the capacity than the previous generation SSDs. The announcement comes several months after Kioxia and SanDisk teamed up to give 3D falsh memory a speed boost (the two announcements are unrelated).
More specifically, Kioxia is offering the CD9P series in capacities ranging from 1.6TB all the way up to 61.44TB in the 2.5-inch (U.2) form factor, and 1.6TB to 30.72TB in the EDSFF E3.2 form factor.
Source: Kioxia
Performance varies by model and capacity, but according to Kioxia, data center customers can expect up to 60% faster sequential reads at 14.8GB/s and up to 45% higher sequential writes at 7GB/s compared to the previous generation for its 15.26TB model. Random read and write gains for the same drive check in at up to 55% and 100%, respectively, for the CD9P series.
"The CD9P series extends our NAND flash leadership with a solution engineered for today’s most demanding AI and accelerated computing environments," said Neville Ichhaporia, senior vice president and general manager of the SSD business unit at KIOXIA America, Inc. "By combining our CBA-based architecture with PCIe 5.0 performance, the CD9P Series helps keep GPUs consistently fed with data - significantly improving utilization while driving greater efficiency, responsiveness, and scalability across AI-driven data center workloads."
Kioxia also says that its newest data center SSDs are purpose-built to handle the increased storage demands of GPU-accelerated AI servers, which are all about maintaining high throughput, low latency, and consistent performance.
A good part of that entails its CBA-based architecture. Kioxia is claiming a reduction in heat management and a lower TCO (total cost of ownership).
Kioxia is currently sampling its CD9P series SSDs to select customers and plans to showcase them further at HPE Discover in Las Vegas next month.
