Samsung is preparing several large-scale projects in the field of flash memories and hard drives. These days the Flash Memory Summit 2022 is being held in California and the different companies have shown their most advanced technologies for these components.
One of these novelties is semantic memory SSD disks, a new style of hard disk that combines the benefits of traditional storage with the dynamic access of DRAM memories.
With the best of two worlds
The big difference between traditional storage and DRAM memories is in the way they retain information. While SSDs are there to store and access information for a long time even if the device is turned off, DRAM memories are for quick access to data, but then it empties. Now Samsung wants to combine these two types of access with the new semantic memory SSD drives, an idea that they unveiled a few months ago with the presentation of MRAM memories.
This technology is now presented as new SSD drives that incorporate 'Leveraging Compute Express Link (CXL)' interconnection technology to work together with a DRAM memory cache. That is, they are like a kind of SSD hard drive with built-in DRAM memory.
As Samsung explains, these new disks allow up to 20 times more reading speed and lower latency, when used for machine learning and artificial intelligence uses. At the moment its use is not proposed at the user level, but dedicated to professionals.
Semantic Memory SSDs are optimized to handle small amounts of data at extreme speed. Following this, Samsung comments that these new disks will be ideal for AIs that require high speed, but are based on relatively small data sets, without specifying how much storage these new disks will have.
UFS 4.0 memories and 1 PB disks also arrive
This groundbreaking technology does not come alone. Samsung has also announced the availability of other previously known technologies that promise to push current boundaries. The first is hard drives up to one Petabyte (1,000 TB). These individual disks will allow expanding the capacity of large data centers on a smaller number of servers.
On the other hand, the first UFS 4.0 memories for mobile phones are already available for large-scale production. Samsung started making them last May and they've already reached the point where we're starting to see them in commercial devices.