Endless Memory, Fast Chiplet Interconnects And New M.2 NVMe Client SSDs

Conceptual image of the brain

MemVerge and SK hynix announced what they call, Project Endless Memory. This is said to be a co-engineered system that addresses the challenge of memory exhaustion in data-intensive applications. Memory exhaustion is a major problem that can cause Out-of-Memory (OOM) crashes or poor performance due to swap usage, especially in clustered environments where memory usage is not uniform across nodes.

Endless Memory combines an Elastic Memory Service software from MemVerge and a Niagara Pooled Memory System from SK hynix to allow hosts to dynamically allocate memory as needed, mitigating OOM errors and improving application performance. Endless Memory features CXL memory pooling and tiering technologies running on real CXL memory pooling hardware from SK hynix. The company says that its innovative solution incorporates technology that transforms the way data-intensive applications are managed and will provide a more seamless and efficient way to manage memory in clustered environments.

SK hynix testing of the project showed that just 20% less CXL memory from the company's Nigra Pooled Memory System improved applications performance by 3X compared with conventional swap memory approaches. features CXL memory pooling and tiering technologies running on real CXL memory pooling hardware from SK hynix. The partners say that this innovative solution incorporates technology that transforms the way data-intensive applications are managed and will provide a more seamless and efficient way to manage memory in clustered environments.

Chiplet company Eliyan introduced a chiplet interconnect solutions using a 5nm TSMC process with 130micron pitch. The interconnect product supports 40Gbps/bump for up to 3TBps/mm on standard organic substrates. This NuLink PHY technology will be used in UCIe chiplet packages to enable multi-die compute intensive architectures. The image below shows this interconnect technology used for chiplet packaging.

Eliyan UCIe Chiplet Interconnect Demonstration

According to the company, Eliyan's chiplet interconnect technology has been the foundation of the Bunch of Wires (BoW) standard (which has been adopted by the Open Compute Project), and is fundamentally compatible with the UCIe standardization efforts. Eliyan is currently working with standards bodies to create an efficient universal die-to-die interconnect optimized for memory traffic to help accelerate the adoption of memory chiplets

Kioxia announced its BG6 Series to its NVMe PCIe® 4.0 solid state drives (SSDs) for client computing applications. Shown below is the M.2 type 2230 version (it is also available in M.2 type 2280).

Kioxia BG6 NVMe M.2 SSD

This SSD uses the company's new, 6th generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory (with 162 layers) and provides almost 1.7 times the performance of its predecessor. The product is in the M.2 2230 form factor. The KIOXIA BG6 drives support the fully matured Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology, which utilizes part of the host memory (DRAM) as if it were its own, to realize a DRAM-less, high-performance SSD. Capacities are available from 256GB to 2.048TB.

Sequential performance is 6GB/s read and 5.2GB/s writes. Random performance is 850k IOPS reading and 900k IOPS writing. The drive supports the latest TCG Pyrite and Opal standards and is complient with the NVMe 1.4c specification. The product was on display at the 2023 Dell Technologies World. Sampling for customer evaluation will start in the second half of 2023.

MemVerge and SK hynix announce Endless Memory for CXL. Eliyan introduces 5nm UCIe interconnect technology. Kioxia introduces its BG6 client M.2 NVMe SSDs using its BICS 6 3D NAND technology.