For AI PCs at NVIDIA GTC 2024
At the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2024 in San Jose, California, SK Hynix introduced a new consumer product called PCB01. This product is a solid-state drive (SSD) and is said to have the best performance in the industry. GTC is a big event organized by NVIDIA, where AI developers from around the world come together to share ideas.
The PCB01 SSD is designed to be used in personal computers (PCs) that have artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. It’s a fifth-generation SSD that uses PCIe technology. SK Hynix has tested its performance and reliability, and a major global customer has confirmed its quality.
SK Hynix worked on developing this product in the first half of 2024. They plan to release two versions of PCB01 by the end of the year. These versions will be aimed at big technology companies as well as regular consumers.
- On-device AI: The performance of AI computation and inference directly within devices such as smartphones or PCs, unlike cloud-based AI services that require a remote cloud server.
- Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe): A high-speed input/output interface with a serialization format used on the motherboard of digital devices.
Optimized for AI PCs, Capable of Loading LLMs Within One Second
Offering the industry’s highest sequential read speed of 14 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and a sequential write speed of 12 GB/s, PCB01 doubles the speed specifications of its previous generation. This enables the loading of LLMs3 required for AI learning and inference in less than one second.
3 Large language model (LLM): As language models trained on vast amounts of data, LLMs are essential for performing generative AI tasks as they create, summarize, and translate texts.
To make on-device AIs operational, PC manufacturers create a structure that stores an LLM in the PC’s internal storage and quickly transfers the data to DRAMs for AI tasks. In this process, the PCB01 inside the PC efficiently supports the loading of LLMs. SK hynix expects these characteristics of its latest SSD to greatly increase the speed and quality of on-device AIs.
PCB01 also offers a 30% improvement in power efficiency compared to its previous generation so it can effectively manage power from large-scale AI computations. In addition, SK hynix has applied single-level cell (SLC)4 caching technology to the product which enables some of the cells—the storage areas of NAND—to operate as SLCs with fast processing speeds. The technology allows selected data to be quickly read and written, speeding up the operation of AI services and general PC operations.
Single-level cell (SLC): A type of memory cell used in NAND flash that stores one bit of data in a single cell. As the amount of data stored increases, the memory cell becomes a multi-level cell (MLC), a triple-level cell (TLC), and so on. Even though more data can be stored in the same area, the speed and stability decreases. SLC speeds up the processing of selected data
Source URL is https://news.skhynix.com/
