SK hynix is displaying its latest AI memory technologies at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2024 held in San Jose from March 18-21. The annual AI developer conference is proceeding as an in-person event for the first time since the start of the pandemic, welcoming industry officials, tech decision makers, and business leaders. At the event, SK hynix is showcasing new memory solutions for AI and data centers alongside its established products.

Showcasing the Industry's Highest Standard of AI Memory
The AI revolution has continued to pick up pace as AI technologies spread their reach into various industries. In response, SK hynix is developing AI memory solutions capable of handling the vast amounts of data and processing power required by AI. At GTC 2024, the company is displaying some of these products, including its 12-layer HBM3E and Compute Express Link (CXL)1, under the slogan "Memory, The Power of AI". HBM3E, the fifth generation of HBM2, is the highest-specification DRAM for AI applications on the market. It offers the industry's highest capacity of 36 gigabytes (GB), a processing speed of 1.18 terabytes (TB) per second, and exceptional heat dissipation, making it particularly suitable for AI systems. On March 19, SK hynix announced it had become the first in the industry to mass-produce HBM3E.

SK hynix press release about its upcoming PCB01 PCIe 5.0 SSD was a bit light on details and Anandtech got a closer look at the upcoming drive at GTC 2024. Not entirely unsurprising, the drive will be called the Platinum P51 rather than the PCB01, which is a continuation of the branding SK hynix is using for its current range of SSDs. As we already know, it'll feature a custom SK hynix controller and no further data was revealed to Anandtech, but the publication did manage to get some more details with regards to the NAND flash used.

The Platinum P51 is SK hynix first consumer SSD with its new-ish 238-layer 4D NAND flash based on the company's PUC (peri. under cell) technology, which places the peripheral circuits under the cell array. The official performance figures of the Platinum P51 appears to be somewhat lower than the press release from earlier today stated, with sequential read speeds of up to 13.5 GB/s and sequential write speeds of 11.5 GB/s. SK hynix will apparently release the drive in the typical SSD sizes of 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. It'll be interesting how SK hynix in-house controller will compare to the second generation of Phison E26 based drives paired with Micron B58R NAND flash once it becomes available later this year.

SK hynix unveiled a new consumer product based on its latest solid-state drive (SSD), PCB01, which boasts industry-leading performance levels at GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2024. Hosted by NVIDIA in San Jose, California from March 18-21, GTC is one of the world's leading conferences for AI developers. Applied to on-device AI PCs, PCB01 is a PCIe fifth-generation SSD which recently had its performance and reliability verified by a major global customer. After completing product development in the first half of 2024, SK hynix plans to launch two versions of PCB01 by the end of the year which target both major technology companies and general consumers.

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 LLMs required for AI learning and inference in less than one second. 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.