Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, is extending its collaboration with TSMC to develop the industry's first technology platform to produce 2 nm semiconductors optimized for accelerated infrastructure.

Behind the Marvell 2 nm platform is the company's industry-leading IP portfolio that covers the full spectrum of infrastructure requirements, including high-speed long-reach SerDes at speeds beyond 200 Gbps, processor subsystems, encryption engines, system-on-chip fabrics, chip-to-chip interconnects, and a variety of high-bandwidth physical layer interfaces for compute, memory, networking and storage architectures. These technologies will serve as the foundation for producing cloud-optimized custom compute accelerators, Ethernet switches, optical and copper interconnect digital signal processors, and other devices for powering AI clusters, cloud data centers and other accelerated infrastructure.

The sneak peeks from the upcoming IEEE Solid State Circuit Conference continues, as the agenda items unveil interesting tech that will be either unveiled or demonstrated there. Intel, Synopsys, and Marvell, are leading providers of DRAM physical layer interface (PHY) IP. Various processor, GPU, and SoC manufacturers license PHY and memory controller IP from these companies, to integrate with their designs. All three companies are ready with over 200 Gbps around the 2.69 to 3 petajoule per bit range. This energy cost is as important as the data-rate on offer; as it showcases the viability of the PHY for a specific application (for example, a smartphone SoC has to conduct its memory sub-system at a vastly more constrained energy budget compared to an HPC processor).

Intel is the first in the pack to showcase a 224 Gbps sub-picojoule/bit PHY transmitter that supports PAM4 and PAM6 signaling, and is designed for 3 nm-class FinFET foundry nodes. If you recall, Intel 3 will be the company's final FinFET node before it transitions to nanosheets with the Intel 20A node. At the physical layer, all digital memory signal is analogue, and Intel's IP focuses on the DAC aspect of the PHY. Next up, is a somewhat similar transceiver IP by Synopsys. This too claims 224 Gbps speeds at 3 pJ/b, but at a 40 dB insertion loss; and is designed for 3 nm class FinFET nodes such as the TSMC N3 family and Intel 3. Samsung's 3 nm node uses the incompatible GAAFET technology for its 3 nm EUV node. Lastly, there's Marvell, with a 212 Gb/s DSP-based transceiver for optical direct-detect applications on the 5 nm FinFET nodes, which is relevant for high speed network switching fabrics.

Plextor, one of the most iconic names in PC storage once known for high performance and quality, has announced it will cease operations. Parent company Kioxia has decided to retire the Plextor brand name for solid state drives (SSDs). Instead, it will market products under its Solid State Storage Technology Corporation (SSSTC) brand going forward. The move comes after Kioxia acquired Plextor and its parent company Lite-On's SSD business back in 2019. Since then, Plextor has struggled to keep pace with new storage technologies. With PCIe Gen 4 and PCIe Gen 5 SSD controllers coming to market, Plextor failed to adopt the new Phison and InnoGrit platforms, instead sticking with Marvell controllers, lagging behind at that time.

Now, SSSTC and Kioxia will strictly focus SSD sales on the enterprise, data center, and industrial segments rather than the consumer market. The Plextor website is already redirecting to SSSTC.com, which no longer lists any drives for client PCs. While current Plextor SSD owners will continue to receive warranty support and RMA services, no new Plextor drives are expected to be released. The company had a history stretching back over 30 years of making top-performing optical disk drives and SSDs. Similarly to OCZ after its acquisition by Toshiba, the Plextor name will now fade into history. But in the fast-moving storage business, companies live and die by their ability to adopt cutting-edge technologies. Hence, companies are always on the edge of their seats, trying to survive.

TrendForce reports that 3Q23 has been a historic quarter for the world's leading IC design houses as total revenue soared 17.8% to reach a record-breaking US$44.7 billion. This remarkable growth is fueled by a robust season of stockpiling for smartphones and laptops, combined with a rapid acceleration in the shipment of generative AI chips and components. NVIDIA, capitalizing on the AI boom, emerged as the top performer in revenue and market share. Notably, analog IC supplier Cirrus Logic overtook US PMIC manufacturer MPS to snatch the tenth spot, driven by strong demand for smartphone stockpiling.

NVIDIA's revenue soared 45.7% to US$16.5 billion in the third quarter, bolstered by sustained demand for generative AI and LLMs. Its data center business—accounting for nearly 80% of its revenue—was a key driver in this exceptional growth.

Marvell Technology, a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, is enabling networking equipment and firewall manufacturers achieve breakthrough levels of performance and efficiency with two new OCTEON 10 data processing units (DPUs), the OCTEON 10 CN102 and OCTEON 10 CN103. The 5 nm OCTEON CN102 and CN103, broadly available to OEMs for product design and pilot production, are optimized for data and control plane applications in routers, firewalls, 5G small cells, SD-WAN appliances, and control plane applications in top-of-rack switches and line card controllers. Several of the world's largest networking equipment manufacturers have already incorporated the OCTEON 10 CN102 into a number of product designs.

Containing up to eight Arm Neoverse N2 cores, OCTEON 10 CN102 and CN103 deliver 3x the performance of Marvell current DPU solutions for devices while reducing power consumption by 50% to 25 W. Achieving SPEC CPU (2017) integer rate (SPECint) scores of 36.5, OCTEON 10 CN102 and CN103 are able to deliver nearly 1.5 SPECint points per Watt. The chips can serve as an offload DPU for host processors or as the primary processor in devices; advanced performance per watt also enables OEMs to design fanless systems to simplify systems and further reduce cost, maintenance and power consumption.

Leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, proudly announces its new WRX90 WS EVO & TRX50 WS motherboard for new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 and AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors. The new motherboards support 4/8 channel memory up to 1 TB/2 TB DDR5 ECC RDIMM, PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots, server grade storage expansion such as Slim-SAS & MCIO and 10 Gbps Ethernet, giving ultimate performance for almost every application such as content creating, video rendering, high-end workstation and even AI machine learning.

Ultimate Performance & Rock-Solid Stability
To ensure stability for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 and AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors in all conditions and systems loads, the WRX90 WS EVO & TRX50 WS has been given a flagship-class server grade ultra-low loss PCB and 18+3+3 phase SPS Dr.MOS VRM design to ensure ultimate performance and superb reliability, even when subjected to the most demanding sustained workloads.

Fueled by an AI-driven inventory stocking frenzy across the supply chain, TrendForce reveals that Q2 revenue for the top 10 global IC design powerhouses soared to US $38.1 billion, marking a 12.5% quarterly increase. In this rising tide, NVIDIA seized the crown, officially dethroning Qualcomm as the world's premier IC design house, while the remainder of the leaderboard remained stable.

AI charges ahead, buoying IC design performance amid a seasonal stocking slump
NVIDIA is reaping the rewards of a global transformation. Bolstered by the global demand from CSPs, internet behemoths, and enterprises diving into generative AI and large language models, NVIDIA's data center revenue skyrocketed by a whopping 105%. A deluge of shipments, including the likes of their advanced Hopper and Ampere architecture HGX systems and the high-performing InfinBand, played a pivotal role. Beyond that, both gaming and professional visualization sectors thrived under the allure of fresh product launches. Clocking a Q2 revenue of US$11.33 billion (a 68.3% surge), NVIDIA has vaulted over both Qualcomm and Broadcom to seize the IC design throne.

TrendForce reports that inventory reduction in Q1 fell short of expectations and coincided with the industry's traditional off-season, leading to overall subdued demand. However, due to new product release and a surge in urgent orders for specialized specifications, Q1 revenue of the global top ten IC design houses remained on par with 4Q22, with a modest QoQ increase of 0.1% for a total revenue of US$33.86 billion. Changes in ranking included Cirrus Logic slipping from the top ten as well as the ninth and tenth positions being replaced by WillSemi and MPS, respectively. The rest of the rankings remained unchanged.

The smartphone supply continues to grapple with overstock, but AI applications are entering a period of rapid growth
Qualcomm witnessed an uptick in its revenue, largely attributed to the launch and subsequent shipments of its latest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8Gen2. The company saw 6.1% in QoQ growth in its smartphone business, which effectively offset the downturn from its automotive and IoT sectors. As a result, Qualcomm's Q1 revenue increased marginally by 0.6%, cementing its position at the top of the pack with a market share of 23.5%.

The global economy has faced increased inflation risks and downstream inventory corrections in 2H22, which have affected IC design houses faster than wafer foundries, as they are far more sensitive and responsive to market reversals. TrendForce reports that adverse factors such as weak overall consumption, restrictions from China, and the slowdown of corporate IT spending and CSP demand have impacted the revenue performance of the world's top 10 IC design houses in 4Q22, leading to a QoQ decline of 9.2%, or approximately US$33.96 billion.

TrendForce predicts that the revenue of these top 10 companies keep declining—though with a slight convergence—into 1Q23, owing to ongoing inventory corrections across the entire supply chain as well as Q1 being the traditional off-season for consumer demand. Demand will continue to be weak despite new product launches and inventory replenishment in the supply chain.

Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, announced today that it has selected Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) as its cloud provider for electronic design automation (EDA). A cloud-first approach helps Marvell to rapidly and securely scale its service on the world's leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by increasingly complex chip design processes, and deliver continuous innovation for the expanding needs across the automotive, carrier, data center, and enterprise infrastructure markets it serves. The work extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies—Marvell is also a key semiconductor supplier for AWS, helping the company support the design and rapid delivery of cloud services that best meet customers' demanding requirements.

EDA refers to the specialized and compute-intensive processes used in chip making and is a critical piece of Marvell's R&D. Over the years, the number of transistors on an integrated chip has increased exponentially. Each advance in chip design calls for a calculated application of software modules overseeing logic design, debugging, component placement, wire routing, optimization of time and power consumption, and verification. Due to the computationally intensive nature of EDA workloads, it is no longer cost-effective or timely to run EDA on premises. By powering its EDA with AWS, Marvell leverages an unmatched portfolio of services including secure, elastic, high-performance compute capacity in the cloud to solve challenges around speed, latency, security of IP, and data transfer.

Yes, you read that correctly, ASUS didn't launch just one, but two W790 based LGA-4677 motherboards today, namely the Pro WS W790-Sage SE and the Pro WS W790-Ace. The main difference here is that the Sage supports up to seven PCIe 5.0 x16 slots—one is a x8 slot electrically—and is designed for the Xeon W-3400 series, whereas the Ace supports five PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and is in turn designed for the Xeon W-2400 series. One downside of these boards is that they might not fit in a standard ATX case, as the Sage follows the SSI-EEB form factor and the Ace the SSI-CEB form factor, both of which are a fair bit wider than an ATX motherboard and with different mounting holes.

The Pro WS W790-ACE also sports eight DDR5 DIMM slots that operate in quad-channel and supports up to 2 TB of RAM if ECC R-DIMMs are used. Furthermore, ASUS has kitted out the Ace with a pair of PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, one 2280 and one 22110 slot, four SATA ports, three slim SAS ports, a Marvell 10 Gbps and an Intel 2.5 Gbps Ethernet interface, a single USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps USB Type-C port around the back and an internal header for a second, case mounted port. Finally the board has four USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps Type-A ports around the back and a header for a further two., as well as eight USB 2.0 ports around the back and audio courtesy of a Realtek S1220A based solution with optical S/PDIF out.

Leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, proudly announces its new ASRock W790 WS motherboard for workstations for Intel Xeon W-3400/W-2400 series processors (LGA4677). The ASRock W790 WS features up to 2 TB DDR5 ECC RDIMM support, PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots, USB4/Thunderbolt 4 and Dual 10 Gbps Ethernet. A flagship-class 14-layer PCB and 20+2 phase CPU VRM ensures ultimate performance and superb reliability, even when subjected to the most demanding sustained workloads.

Supports New 4th Generation Xeon Processor
The W790 WS chipset is optimized for new Intel Xeon W-2400 series (LGA4677) processors and is compatible with W-3400 series processors with up to 56 cores also. The ASRock W790 WS provides a quad-channel DDR5 design with 2DPC over 8 DIMM slots, maximizing memory performance, potential memory pool capacity and supports ECC RDIMMs to ensure data reliability.

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce reports that the revenue generation momentum of the global IC design industry slowed down in 3Q22. The main factors behind this development were the Russia-Ukraine military conflict, the recent COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the ongoing inflation, and clients undergoing inventory corrections. The total revenue of the global top 10 IC design houses came to US$37.38 billion for 3Q22, showing a QoQ decline of 5.3%. Qualcomm remained first place in the ranking of the global top 10 IC design houses by revenue for 3Q22. Broadcom returned to second place by overtaking NVIDIA and AMD, who slipped to third and fourth respectively due to weakening demand for PCs and cryptocurrency mining machines.

Regarding US-based IC design houses that were in the top 10 group for 3Q22, Qualcomm recorded a QoQ increase for the sales of smartphone SoCs and 5G modem chips. It also made gains in the automotive electronics market by expanding its collaborations with partners in the automotive industry. As a result, Qualcomm's 3Q22 revenue figures for mobile and automotive offerings reflected QoQ increases of 6.8% and 22.0% respectively. The revenue growth of these two major product categories offset the marginal decline in the revenue for RF front-end chips. Qualcomm's IC design revenue as a whole climbed up by 5.6% QoQ to US$9.90 billion for 3Q22. The company sat firmly at the top of the ranking.

ASUS today announced the availability of new Intel Z790 motherboards, including the ROG Maximus Z790 Apex, TUF Gaming Z790-PLUS WiFi and ProArt Z790-Creator WiFi - all of which provide DDR5 memory module support and PCIe 5.0 slots for video cards and storage.ASUS Z790 motherboards offer tremendous value to anyone assembling an Intel 13th Gen machine that includes AEMP II, AI Overclocking, AI Cooling II, PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, Thunderbolt 4, WiFi 6E, Quick Charge 4+ technology and comprehensive connectivity. Overall, new ASUS Z790 motherboards are ideal solutions for any user who wants to build a next-gen machine or upgrade their existing system.

First up is the ROG Maximus Z790 Apex. The ultimate option for memory overclocking enthusiasts, this motherboard boasts a cutting-edge feature set. Then, for creative professionals of all kinds, ASUS offers the ProArt Z790-Creator WiFi. This motherboard offers premium connectivity and bespoke style, and it's fully ready for next-gen graphics cards and ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 storage. Finally, ASUS is bolstering its TUF Gaming lineup with the TUF Gaming Z790-Plus WiFi, which brings DDR5 support to the family.

Intel's 13th generation of Core CPUs have arrived, and they're ready for action. Boasting up to eight performance cores and sixteen efficiency cores for a total of 32 threads, and arriving with out-of-the-box support for DDR-5600 and next-gen PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and M.2 SSDs, these chips are sure to draw the eye of discerning gamers—and we've got the motherboards you need to unlock their full potential.

For those who dare to build a PC replete with cutting-edge tech and unconventional style, we offer the ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme and the ROG Maximus Z790 Hero. ROG Strix returns to deliver stunning good looks and jaw-dropping performance in four different options. And if you're looking for mainstream TUF Gaming and ASUS Prime Z790 motherboards, we've got those, too. Head over to our full Z790 motherboard guide for all the details.

Marvell today unveiled its LiquidSecurity 2 (LS2) hardware security module (HSM) adapter, the industry's most advanced solution for enabling encryption, key management, authentication and other HSM services in the cloud. LS2 is a converged security platform for payment, privacy compliance, and general purpose applications, and is powered by a cloud-optimized Marvell OCTEON data processing unit (DPU), proven at scale across the world's largest hyperscale clouds. The new Marvell HSM adapter offers the industry's highest performing cryptographic acceleration and processing, including hardware-secured storage of up to one million keys for AES, RSA and ECC encryption algorithms, and 45 partitions for robust multi-tenant use cases.

As enterprises migrate from on-premises to private- or multi-cloud environments, the industry-leading Marvell LiquidSecurity platform empowers cloud service providers and large enterprises to create HSM-as-a-service clouds. Marvell's HSM adapters have the latest FIPS-certified security boundary, designed for the most demanding applications deployed at cloud-scale while offering best-in-class cost, performance and energy efficiency for both public and private clouds.

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, revenue of the top ten global IC design houses reached US$39.56 billion in 2Q22, growing 32% YoY. Growth was primarily driven by demand for data centers, networking, IoT, and high-end product portfolios. AMD achieved synergy through mergers and acquisitions. In addition to climbing to third place, the company also posted the highest annual revenue growth rate in 2Q22 at 70%.

Qualcomm continues in the No. 1 position worldwide, exhibiting growth in the mobile phone, RF front-end, automotive, and IoT sectors. Sales of mid/low-end mobile phone APs were weak but demand for high-end mobile phone APs was relatively stable. Company revenue reached US$9.38 billion, or 45% growth YoY. NVIDIA benefitted from expanded application of GPUs in data centers to expand this product category's revenue share past the 50% mark to 53.5%, making up for the 13% YoY slump in its game application business, bringing total revenue to US$7.09 billion, though annual growth rate slowed to 21%. AMD reorganized its business after the addition of Xilinx and Pensando. The company's embedded division revenue increased by 2,228% YoY. In addition, its data center department also made a considerable contribution. AMD posted revenue of US$6.55 billion, achieving 70% growth YoY, highest amongst the top ten. Broadcom's sales performance in semiconductor solutions remained solid and demand for cloud services, data centers, and networking is quite strong. The company's purchase order backlog is still increasing with 2Q22 revenue reaching US$6.49 billion, an annual growth rate of 31%.

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced the latest gaming gear at Gamescom 2022, including the AMD X670E series motherboards, AIO coolers, PSU, displays, networking products, and peripherals. Along with these products, ROG released its first music single Reality, with vocals by renowned voice actor and musician Troy Baker, more commonly known for his roles in video games like The Last of Us and Uncharted series. An anime-inspired interactive 360° music video featuring the song is available on YouTube.

ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ / PG48UQ: The 42-inch ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ is designed for immersive desktop gaming and features 4K visuals at an overclocked 138 Hz refresh rate. The OLED panel ensures the deepest hues, as well as vibrant colors thanks to a 98% DCI-P3 color gamut and Delta E < 2 color difference. An ultrafast 0.1 ms (GTG) response time ensures great viewing and gaming experiences. The larger, 48-inch ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ is ideal for those looking to play their games on an even bigger scale. ROG OLED monitors include a custom heatsink that offers more surface area for heat exchange, resulting in up to 8% lower operating temperatures compared to ROG monitors without a heatsink to ensure better OLED performance and longevity.

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, the top ten IC designers worldwide posted a combined revenue of US$39.43 billion in 1Q22, or 44% growth YoY. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Broadcom ranked in the top three. After the acquisition of Xilinx, AMD surpassed MediaTek in the fourth position. In addition, according to TrendForce tracking of IC design industry trends, revenue generated by Will Semiconductor and Cirrus Logic was enough to be included in the top ten for the first time.

Benefiting from growth performance in handsets and RF front-end divisions in addition to its IoT and automotive divisions in 1Q22, Qualcomm's quarterly revenue reached US$9.55 billion, or 52% growth YoY, ranking number one in the world. The expanded application of GPUs in data centers boosted this portion of NVIDIA's revenue to 45.4%, surpassing the 45% accounted for by its gaming business, combining for a total revenue of US$7.9 billion, or 53% growth YoY. Broadcom's revenue from semiconductor solutions is substantial, including network chips, broadband communication chips, and storage and bridging chips. Its business has maintained stable sales performance, with revenue reaching US$6.11 billion, or 26% growth YoY. After the addition of Xilinx, AMD's revenue reached US$5.89 billion, or 71% growth YoY. However, even excluding Xilinx, due to strong sales in its enterprise, embedded and semi-customized divisions, AMD's own business revenue still hit an all-time high of US$5.33 billion.

Although AMD didn't provide too many details during its Computex 2022 keynote speech about the upcoming AM5 platform, the company did announce that there will be at least three chipsets for the platform and showed pictures of some upcoming motherboards. ASUS has kindly filled in some more details about its upcoming ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme, which will be one of its higher-end models. Sadly the pictures posted are kind of tiny and the company didn't provide a shot of the rear I/O. That said, ASUS did point out some of its new features that we can expect to find on the ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme.

For starters, the board will have a pair of PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, although each slot is likely to only have eight lanes each, when both slots are in use, but ASUS doesn't mention any details here. The board has support for up to five M.2 NVMe SSDs, four of which support PCIe 5.0. Only two are onboard, with the other three being via ASUS' proprietary ROG PCIe 5.0 M.2 card and ROG GEN-Z.2 card. ASUS also promises USB4 support, as well as a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 header with Quick Charge 4+ as well as up to 60 W charging support, for cases with a front USB-C port. On top of the rear I/O is an AniMe Matrix LED display that can be user customised.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched the new TS-435XeU 4-bay NAS that uses a Marvell OCTEON TX2 CN9131 quad-core 2.2 GHz processor. With a compact 1U short depth chassis, the TS-435XeU can be easily installed in small media cabinets or places with a lot of cabling. As an entry-level rackmount NAS that balances cost and performance, the TS-435XeU includes dual 10GbE and dual 2.5GbE ports, two M.2 PCIe Gen 3 NVMe SSD slots, storage scalability, and highly-anticipated business and media features.

"The short-depth TS-435XeU NAS satisfies business demands for high performance and efficient space utilization," said Jason Hsu, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "With high-speed 2.5GbE, 10GbE, and M.2 NVMe SSD slots, the TS-435XeU delivers a premium experience compared with other NAS in the same price range and provides an all-round reliable NAS solution for quality IT efficiency and data storage."

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) today announced the industry's first 800 Gbps or 8x 100 Gbps multimode platform solution, that enables data center infrastructure to achieve dramatically higher speeds for short-reach optical modules and Active Optical Cable (AOC) applications. As artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications continue to drive greater bandwidth requirements, cloud-optimized solutions are needed that can bring lower power, latency and cost to short-range data center interconnections. The new 800G platform, which includes Marvell's PAM4 DSP with a multimode transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and Driver, enables faster data center speeds scaling to 800 Gbps, using conventional cost-effective vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) technology while accelerating time-to-market with plug-and-play deployment.

Today's data centers are packed with equipment utilizing optical modules or AOCs connected by multimode optical fiber optimized for communication over short distances within data centers. This 100G per lane multimode fiber provides cost-effective, low-power, short-reach connectivity. To support multi-gigabit transmissions, multimode architectures often use VCSEL transmitters, which offer the cost benefits of reliability, power efficiency and easy deployment.

At the launch of the Z690 chipset, ASRock didn't reveal its flagship Aqua model, but now the company has finally announced not just one, but two Z690 Aqua models, one "regular" SKU and one OC SKU. The main difference between the two is that the OC SKU only has two DIMM slots, since as we know, DDR5 is extra finicky when it comes to running at high clock speeds and two DIMM boards allow for higher DRAM clock speeds, This also means that all the major board makers have now launched a two DIMM product geared towards overclockers.

The two boards are mostly identical in terms of features otherwise, but there are some minor differences that we'll point out later. As expected, both boards feature a large, nicely integrated liquid cooling plate for the CPU and the 20 phase 105 A SPS VRM setup. ASRock has gone for a 12 layer PCB, not something you see in a lot of consumer motherboards and it's unclear if it'll bring any real benefits, but as this is a premium motherboard, it's a nice touch. The heatsink of the top-most M.2 drive is home to a small OLED display, but ASRock hasn't listed the size on its website.

Marvell today announced that it will ship its 5 billionth hard disk drive (HDD) controller next month, marking a significant milestone in the company's 25 years of delivering data storage solutions. This achievement is a testament to the longevity of Marvell's HDD business and underscores the company's ongoing commitment to investing in and developing cutting-edge Bravera HDD products and IP to address the ever-increasing need for greater storage capacity.

The ongoing digital transformation is driving the adoption of cloud services, digital payments, artificial intelligence, and 5G, requiring higher capacity data storage. As a result, cloud data centers are looking for HDD storage to meet the growing zettabyte demand. Marvell's comprehensive suite of Bravera HDD controller and preamplifier solutions leverage the company's IP and process excellence including over 1,500 HDD-related patents and 18 generations of Read Channel IP. With its advanced architecture built on best-in-class areal density, data reliability, and power consumption, Marvell is enabling the growth of mass storage applications from the edge to the cloud.

"Reaching our 5 billionth HDD controller shipment is a huge accomplishment and we'd like to take a moment to thank our longstanding customers and partners for their trust and collaboration over many years. We celebrate this milestone alongside them," said Dan Christman, Executive Vice President, Storage Group at Marvell. "We remain deeply committed to the HDD market and will continue to invest in leading-edge Bravera technologies that advance the next generation of cloud data storage infrastructure."

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the production availability of its EM6 Series Enterprise NVMe-oF solid state drives (SSDs) for Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) systems. Using the Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-oF SSD converter controller that converts an NVMe SSD into a dual-ported 25Gb NVMe-oF SSD, KIOXIA EM6 Series drives expose the entire SSD bandwidth to the network.

Due to their ability to scale performance of NVMe SSDs, native NVMe-oF architectures are well-suited for applications such as artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), high performance computing (HPC) and storage expansion. In the case of HPC, leveraging the Lustre file system, which is used to provide high bandwidth and parallel access to compute clusters, is beneficial to NVMe-oF based storage, such as EBOF systems with EM6 SSDs, that enable high availability (HA) configurations. An HPC HA configuration example consists of multiple and redundant network connections between a compute host and an EBOF with 88SN2400-connected NVMe SSDs, to deliver scalable throughput based on the number of SSDs.